


Layover

by stayseated



Series: Departure/Arrival [2]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-18
Updated: 2018-02-28
Packaged: 2019-03-21 00:04:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 15
Words: 38,038
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13728840
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stayseated/pseuds/stayseated
Summary: Sequel to Departure. Anthology-style one-shots, told from other POVs.





	1. Drogo

 

 

 

Interestingly, before Drogo gets to march into Dany’s office and unleash the words that he’s been aching to say to her for years — he has this crazy restless dream where he had to eat his own poop and his reading glasses were broken in front of his face because, in his dream, he lied about being legally blind in order to get into a restricted area to film. He was trying to hustle, and he got punished for it.

Grey told him that dreams actually mean nothing, but Drogo is prone to ascribing slight meaning to things, a habit he picked up from his mother. She sees signs. She says the day he was born, the sky was clear and it was blue — a good omen that ended up being true, because she got him out of the whole ordeal. He was supposedly a really painful birth because he was so fat and huge. Her body has never recovered.

Dany knows what’s up — sort of. She can tell that something momentous is about to happen to her, so she warily tries to get him to move it along, to speed it up and just blurt it out already.

This woman has been lording her power over him for years now, so he will enjoy every single last second of this. The door to her office is closed. He leans back in his chair — or her chair. It’s a chair she picked out at some home goods store. It’s ugly. It creaks underneath his body. He remembers Grey telling him to try not to burn bridges, but Drogo also remembers telling Grey to just shove it. He is not classy. He is petty, and he is amazing.

“I quit, bitch!” Drogo exclaims, right into Dany’s face. He raises his arms in victory. And it feels so good. “I fucking quit this show. I quit Jaime Lannister. I fucking quit _you._ I quit!”

She’s biting her tongue — he can tell. He knows this face and this uptight person really, really well. She’s refraining from giving him an inch, from giving him any satisfaction. His grin widens because her tyranny is over! He is free!

Dany does not respond to him calling her a bitch — probably for the best. Instead she dully asks, “Grey knows?”

“Of course Grey knows.” Of course Grey knows because Grey is his boy. They’ve been talking about this for months, if not years. He repeats, “Grey knows. We’ve talked about it.”

“Okay,” Dany says, maintaining her poker face. “I trust Grey to make sure nothing is interrupted. Just help him where you can, okay? Two weeks? Is this your two weeks notice?”

Drogo chuckles, because this fucking bitch. She has managed to kind of ruin quitting for him. She is kind of amazing.

 

 

  
He spots Grey’s skinny ass and his hunched back facing the door. Drogo excitedly rushes up to his friend and jarringly rams himself into Grey’s spine.

Grey’s beer sloshes and then spills a bit over the counter. Grey is bitching and moaning, saying, “What the fuck, man!” trying to alternate his annoyance with Drogo with super polite and apologetic words to one of the bartenders. He’s saying, “Uh, I’m sorry, but can I get some more napkins? Sorry!” And then back to Drogo, he says, “Fuck you, Drogo.”

Drogo ignores all of that. Instead, he says, “I did it! I did it! I pulled the trigger. I told that bitch I quit!”

Grey’s tense face smooths out into a relaxed smile and a laugh when he realizes what Drogo is talking about. In awe, he says, “Just you? You fucker.”

Drogo cackles maniacally, swiping Grey’s beer glass from the counter and chugging from it. He gestures to the ever-suffering bartender, signalling he wants two more of these. His laughing only intensifies, when Grey slams his fist into Drogo’s shoulder, and Grey shakes his head in disbelief.

He says, “We talked about this, you asshole. We said we’d wait to tell her. Together. You promised me.”

Around his chuckles, Drogo says, “You can’t trust me! You just can’t! I’m a fucking liar!”

“Oh my God. I feel terrible for Dany.”

“Man, forget about her for a second,” Drogo says, before finishing off the rest of Grey’s beer. “Let’s talk about what we’re gonna _buy!”_

“You’re the fucking worst!” Grey shouts in his face.

And Drogo laughs and laughs because he’s actually so fucking happy. His face feels shiny and bright — and it must be infectious because he sees Grey crack. He sees that guy’s face struggle not to break. Drogo reaches out and roughly smears the palm of his hand over Grey’s chest — Grey is squeamish and weird about this, and this is precisely why Drogo keeps doing it. He maintains contact as he feels around for heartbeat. He knows he is a punk, but he can’t help but feel this way — he can’t help but feel this way — and it only grows, and it glows as a smile sneaks out of Grey’s face.

“No one but you,” Drogo says, kind of too seriously and too earnestly. “It’s us, man. It’s always gonna be us.” He pats Grey in the middle of his chest.

“Team Beef Steak and Baby Bear,” Grey affirms.

“Is it beef cake or beef steak?”

“Man, I think it’s steak.”

“Whatever, I fucking hate those shitty nicknames.”

“Yara is still kind of hilarious though.”

“Oh, no doubt.”

What Drogo doesn’t say is that they don’t need anyone else because they have each other. It took Grey so fucking long to get over Missandei, and isn’t this what they deserve? Isn’t this what they need? They need to carve out their own happiness. They need to make it for themselves.

And it is right here. They are on the cusp of something really, really special. He never thought he’d ever be here. He never thought this would be his life.

For the rest of the night, they drink way too much — they drink like they are celebrating. They clink glasses, and they make up shit to cheers about. They talk about office space — Grey proposes a shared space kind of deal because they can save money that way. Any talk about details just bores the shit out of Drogo, so he twists the conversation back to the shit they will buy — none of it is realistic and it’s more of a wishlist. He talks about the blogs he’s been reading and these lens kits and also all of the equipment they will lose because they are leaving Dany together. Drogo fantasizes ahead to a time when they are actually profitable. He thinks about all of the people he can poach from Dany if he can afford to do it. First would be Sandor, obviously.

Grey fixates on his guilt. He feels bad that they are both leaving at the same time and leaving her in the lurch. He gets a little bit ticked with Drogo again, for the really inelegant and impulsive way that Drogo dropped the news — and also only half of it, so that she will be further tortured later, when she finds out that her favorite is also jumping ship. 

Drogo doesn't care. He aggressively does not care about Grey's guilt. It does not matter because this is going to be for the best. 

They talk about how things change — and how young they were when they first started. They talk about what they have learned and what they can still stand to learn.

 

 

 

 

 


	2. Tyrion

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tyrion says goodbye to his dad.

 

 

  
His dad takes forever to die, which Tyrion supposes, makes a lot of sense and is in line with what his dad is all about. Even his dad’s doctors are shocked at how the old man manages to hold on for months and months beyond his original expiration date.

In that time, Jaime puts his entire life on hold. He does what he is afraid of. He risks becoming obsolete and being replaced as he takes a hiatus from the show in order to stay home in King’s Landing — for what, Tyrion does not know. Jaime mostly just lives an ordinary life, doing chores and running errands — cleaning his own house for perhaps the very first time in his life. Jaime doesn’t particularly spend more time with their dad, but whenever Tyrion questions his brother about that, it just ends up making the both of them feel bad.

Tyrion does not take a break from work. He sees no reason to. He just carries on as if everything is normal because everything _is_ normal. This _is_ his life.

Sansa does not understand his family — because she grew up with a lot of love and a lot of closeness. Whether it’s fair or not, this fact about her makes him disregard many of the things she says. She wastes long months trying to convince him to see his father, telling him that he needs the closure because he could regret it for the rest of this life. He tells her that he already has so many regrets that he will hold onto for the rest of his life. He does not need to open old wounds. He really does not want to go over there and watch has ex-wife mourn or pretend to mourn a man who was wildly abusive. Like — this just does not make any fucking sense to him at all. Why would he even do this?

Things change — kind of — when the end comes as close as it’s ever been. She’s been talking to Jaime because he refuses to talk to Jaime about this. Over dinner one night, she gets so upset with him and she tells him that she cannot abide by this.

It makes no sense to him. He says, “By what? What are you talking about?”

“You’re kind of just leaving him alone to deal with this by himself.”

That statement just makes him flare in rage. He ends up shattering a glass tumbler on his table because he slams it down. He ends up cutting his hand and just trying to reject her help as she grabs the first-aid kit and the broom to clean up his mess. It seems like this might be her sorry lot in life — cleaning up his shit.

Steadily and evenly — because he loves her — it takes all of the strength he possesses to calmly tell her that leaving his dad alone to deal with this by himself is precisely what he intends to do.

She pauses, staring at him with her sad eyes. She says, “I meant Jaime. I was talking about Jaime, not your dad.”

 

 

  
Seeing his dad again for the last time is just about as terrible as he anticipated it’d be — if not more terrible, actually. He immediately feels sick to his stomach, for one, when he sees their dad lying in the bed, kind of unable to talk or move. Their dad is really underweight and sickly looking, but he thinks that he can see his dad recognizing him and it just makes him so fucking angry. He has nothing to say to this person. The room smells like death.

Shae starts sobbing uncontrollably when she sees him. And he doesn’t say anything to her either because he has nothing to say to her. When she tries to gesture to him and when she tries to address him, all he can say is, “No,” and, “Stop.”

He sits there for hours with Shae and Cersei. He’s silent, and he has to listen to them make small talk with each other.

Jaime appears later that night — wearing gym clothes. And when Jaime recognizes and sees him — it worsens. How he feels worsens inside when he sees Jaime fight back tears, before his brother takes the empty seat next to him. Jaime’s clenched left fist lightly knocks down on his knee, and perhaps for now, it’s enough.

They sit there like that for a long time, in a dark and depressing purgatory, only occasionally interrupted by a nurse that kind of has a hard time reading the room. She murmurs that their father is so lucky to have such devoted children, and that he is at peace.

The first thing anyone says in hours is after she leaves. It’s Cersei. She mutters, “Oh my God, that dumb bitch.”

It kind of makes him burst out laughing. It’s entirely inappropriate and Shae flinches as if she’s been slapped in the face. But he kind of laughs, and he feels Jaime place the good, working hand on his shoulder.

 

 

  
Their dad dies on a Tuesday. They have the funeral the following Friday. He tells Sansa that he does not want her to be there — not really because he’s trying to shut her out — more because she didn’t really know his father, not truly. And he’d like to keep it that way.

When he gets there, he actually wonders if he’s made a mistake not inviting Sansa, because it’s kind of a party. Grey and Brienne are there, two annoyingly tall people dressed in dark colors, trying to blend in with the rest of his family, doing a shit-poor job of it.

Uncle Kevan gives the eulogy. Jaime bowed out of the responsibility. He watches Shae sob her guts out as his dad’s casket gets lowered into the ground. He wonders how real it was. He wonders if his dad was actually capable of loving someone.

 

 

  
They all secretly congregate at Jaime’s place after the ceremony — him, Cersei, Brienne, and Grey. He texts Sansa and he asks her to come meet them, because she might as well bear witness to this fucking horror show.

An hour later, she appears in the doorway with — no fucking lie — a case of wine — with twelve bottles that she is practically dragging against the floor. It makes him laugh and it’s probably only the second time he has laughed all month. Grey rushes over to help her carry it the rest of the way into Jaime’s apartment.

“Oh, is everyone responsible for two bottles then?” he asks, smiling at her.

“I just panicked when you texted!” she confesses. “And I just started grabbing alcohol!”

“I love you,” he says, breathing it out. He never typically admits this in front of other people. He sometimes has enough trouble admitting it to her.

“Dude,” Jaime says plainly. “I can do two bottles.”

 

 

  
It takes Jaime and him practically no time at all, to consume two bottles of wine. Grey follows closely behind, more apt to take the time to savor the taste. Tyrion starts pulling sips from Sansa’s second bottle. She is struggling. She has been taking so many pee breaks.

Cersei is close — her mouth stained red. She keeps touching her miserably limp hair — tamped down by a bit of rain. She is so drunk and also so maudlin and kind of apologetic when she is drunk — a weird switch from her usual rage and pettiness. She keeps talking about how they need to work harder to stay in touch with each other, now their father is dead and there’s no reason to have terrible family dinners.

“I haven’t been at family dinner in years,” he reminds her.

“Oh,” she says, remembering. “Well, now you can come to them again. I won’t fucking invite that golddigger.”

“That’s really touching,” he says sarcastically. But he kind of also means it, a little bit.

 

 

  
Grey and Jaime are lying on the ground. Brienne is sequestered on the couch. Cersei has gone home to her children. And Sansa is asleep in the loveseat. They are trading tragedies — because it kind of seemed like a good idea when this game first started.

Beyond dead mom, Brienne sucks at this game. She struggles to find things to match them with. She tells them that she had a hard time in high school because she is so tall and gross. And he swivels his face to her and he reminds her he’s totally malformed so she can really fuck off on that unpopular childhood thing. He wins. She loses.

She’s generally quiet after that, content to just nurse the shit out of her second bottle of wine as she listens to their terrible and shitty stories.

Grey tells them his parents were murdered and he was left alone for a long time. He reminds them that, oops, his fucked body totally forgot to go through puberty. And then oops, a brain tumor almost cut his life short. He tells them that he lost the love of his life and nothing will ever match the magnitude of that. So — that is his shit.

Jaime tells them that his mother died when he was a little kid and his dad was generally shitty and beat the shit out of them whenever he got pissed. He engaged in a really toxic and really inappropriate relationship with his sister, and he’s still plowing through a lot of therapy to try and work through that insanity. And then he drove into a building, maimed a child, and lost his hand — and he’s also trying to work through that in therapy, with fairly average results. Jaime reminds them that he’s fucking stupid and devoid of talent — and he is getting old. He is getting too old to skate by solely on his looks. And no one loves him because he is disgusting. So that’s his shit.

Tyrion laughs again — to the ceiling. Out loud, he says, “My God. My wife. Cheated on me with my dad. And she’s about to get all of our family money. Dude. We are so big on incest.”

“Oh my God,” Grey mutters, coughing out a laugh of his own.

“So who wins?” Jaime says, also to the ceiling. “Brienne, who wins? Whose life is the most tragic?”

 

 

  
Seated in his dad’s lawyer's big and sterile office, he actually learns that his dad didn’t completely write him out of the will. Tyrion gets a modest sum, surprisingly with no strings attached.

He exchanges glances with Jaime, who shrugs.

He says he doesn’t want the money. He doesn’t want any of it.

 

 

  
He tells Sansa that he wants to marry her when he is too exhausted and tired to even think. He’s not taking any bereavement leave for his dad’s shit, so he is due to get on a plane the next day. He tells her that he’s been thinking about this for a long time now — just the idea that he wants permanence with her — he wants it really badly.

He tells her it was just never the right time to bring it up because of all of the shit with his family. He didn’t want to say or do anything from a place of pain and a place of hurt. He kept trying to wait it out, wait until he could tell her how he feels in a fair and complete way.

“But fuck it,” he says. “I am gonna pass out, and I’m not going to see you for weeks. I just want you to know — that I want to start making plans with you. How do you feel about that?”

“Yeah,” she says, nodding her head and grabbing at the ends of her red hair. “Yeah,” she repeats, affirming what she just said. “I really want that, too.”

He feels like a weight has been lifted off his shoulders, but he sinks further down in his seat anyway. He says, “Oh, good. Great. I’m so glad.” And then he adds, “I really do love you.”

 

 

 

 


	3. Jaime

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jaime quits his job. Does not get the girl.

 

 

 

Contract negotiations stall when he suddenly realizes that he wishes to end his relationship with the show. He is a cliche — a washed up has-been that goes through some sort of emotional crisis because he is no longer the fairest in all of the land. He tells Margaery to spin it like that because he does not even give a shit. He’s been phoning it in for a while now — and he hates himself for it.

Margaery delicately pauses and tells him that she definitely will not spin it that way.

All at once, they learn that there is nothing he wants that they can offer him. He makes it clear that he will not try and re-up his contract, and that this is not a power-play. This is legitimate. He is legitimately quitting. He tells them that it shouldn’t be hard to replace him with a younger, hipper talking head.

He hasn’t felt good about any of it for a long time. He doesn’t know how long he’s meant to mug for a camera and stuff food into his face. He doesn’t know how long this is supposed to be interesting.

He honestly does not think that his departure is going to be the show’s death knell — but it does end up setting a bunch of things in motion that results in the current season being their very last. High production costs and dwindling ratings are probably the real reasons it gets shuttered, but they — the media — want to blame him. He doesn’t mind being blamed.

He gives a lot of interviews, shoving down rumors of strife between him and Dany. He’s always gotten along terribly with her, so that’s not really new and that’s not something that would make him leave a job. He insists to reporters that he has nothing else lined up. He is really intentional and really earnest when he tells them that he’s probably just going to take a break for a while. He’s been working for a long, long time. It’s just a good idea to relax for a little bit. He no longer feels he has something to prove.

This is probably a lie.

 

 

  
The staff jokes with him, that he is the reason they are all out of a job. It makes his heart hurt, because it’s probably a little bit true, and it’s not the first time that his self-centeredness has adversely affected those around him. Maybe he should’ve hung on for as long as he could, because these people have bills.

It’s actually Dany that absolves him of some of the guilt. She says, “Hey, we had a longer run than any of us really expected.”

 

 

  
They decide that the very last episode has to be filmed at home — it has to be a King’s Landing episode. A bunch of them curry personal favors — many of them ask Grey to return, for instance. They ask Grey to come back for one last run with the assumption that Drogo is not far behind.

Dany emailed Missandei and also asked her to come back one last time — and from what Dany tells him, it nearly happens. Reportedly, Missandei tried really hard to make the scheduling work, but it fell through and she cannot spare the time. Dany tells them all that Missandei sends her well wishes. She sends her regrets. She wishes she could have that one last hurrah with them.

Daario shows up with a wedding ring on his finger and a lot of cordial politeness, as he generally tries not to get in the way of Bronn.

 

 

  
Honestly, Jaime is pretty sure that this last episode is really fucking bloated and overstaffed. Grey and Drogo are here at a really cut rate. They are basically working for free. It seems utterly insane to him that two camera guys of their caliber are taking orders from Pod — from their former intern-turned-assistant-turned-DP. It’s utterly crazy that Grey and Drogo are wandering around capturing B-roll for a couple of days, like it’s not completely stupid and a waste of their time.

Everyone is in great spirits though — everyone around him seems pretty happy.

The deeper they get immersed in the last episode, the more it gives him heart pangs — the more it kind of aches. It’s actually some of the most fun Jaime has had in years — because the pressure is off, the pressure to perform has lessened because he gives very few shits these days, and he’s been letting himself eat more liberally. He’s been able to be more lax with his diet. He’s been wondering if his crankiness in years past was due to the fact that he was starving.

 

 

  
“Oh my God, it’s the last time,” Jaime says. “Oh my God, it’s the last time. Oh my God, it’s the last time!” It’s the last time they are going to film themselves getting progressively more and more drunk on camera.

Dany laughs at that, with her hand lightly touching her face kind of shyly, kind of coquettishly. He might end up missing her. Just a little bit.

They are ignoring the crowd that has gathered around them. Sandor is removing anyone who accidentally leaves the flash on, on their phones. Jaime is crammed at a table — it feels like crew dinner except it’s not really. Tyrion and Grey are flanking him. It took a fair bit of cajoling to convince Grey to appear on camera. The idea is to pull back the curtain and have dinner and drinks with the guys that really set the entire look and visual tone of their show.

Grey translates his discomfort by constantly putting his hand up to cover his face — purposely ruining shots — as he constantly corrects Pod and tells Pod the camera is too close or the lighting is distracting. Pod has been sweating buckets and working overtime to gain the approval of his mentors.

Daario, off camera, has to repeatedly remind Drogo to stop singing whatever song is in his head, because he is mic’d — and it’s like Drogo is not a fucking expert on all of this shit.

“Holy shit, you guys are terrible,” Tyrion mutters into his glass of hard liquor, laughing softly at Grey and Drogo. “How are you guys so terrible at this?”

“God, this is way harder than I thought it’d be,” Grey mumbles, smearing both of his hands down his face, smearing some of his words so he’s indecipherable, stretching his face so he looks ghoulish and really unattractive. Fucking great. Another shot ruined. It’s also like this guy is an idiot and not actually a fucking expert on this stuff.

“Baby bear!” Yara yells at him, from off screen. “You need to get your fucking hands off your fucking face! Goddammit!”

 

 

  
Jaime has always maintained that there is actually an art to getting drunk on camera. There’s a technique and a feel that he has developed for it. And as he watches Grey and Drogo act like complete drunk messes and flub simple sentences over and over — as he listens to them actually apologize to him and Dany for all of the years of hilarious shit they gave him and Dany for being stupid, pretty people who are only good at eating and talking at the same time — well, Jaime kind of feels warm and fuzzy inside over the unexpected apology.

“Gah, I hate that term — food porn,” Grey says, eyes heavy-lidded and body swaying in his seat. “It’s like, what is porn?”

He pauses for entirely way too long that it starts to sound a little weirdly philosophical, so Dany tries to fill the space. She starts to say, “Oh, porn is —”

 _“Excess,_ ” Grey says, talking right over her. Great. Fucking moron. “Porn is an exaggeration that twists itself so far beyond reality — you know? It’s like — brightly light, beautifully composed plates — and it’s soulless and _dead._ It’s dumb, and it’s easy. And I really did not want what we did here to be porn.”

 

 

  
When Tyrion calls it done — when he lifts off his headphones and grins at them, nodding his head — they all swarm him. They all pile on in a huge group hug.

They stand around like that for a long, long time — going around in a circle and giving each other space to say a few words. Sandor says he’s never worked with people that he has found more pleasant and more talented. Hodor says that if he had to constantly be away from his family for work, he is glad that he has been able to spend time with them. They are his second family. Dany tells them all that she is actually really, really sad that it is coming to a close. She will probably fall into a temporary depression over this. She will miss them very much.

When it’s his turn, Jaime actually gets choked up. He has a hard time pushing out the words he wants to say. He finds that he has a hard time saying goodbye.

 

 

  
It takes him probably an entire minute before he musters up the courage to walk up to her, as she’s packing away her notebook and tablet into her messenger bag. She stands up and hikes the strap higher on her shoulder as he approaches. She gives him a smile that is entirely unguarded and bright. This is probably the very last time that he gets to do this, in this way.

When he’s within earshot, he asks, “Can I walk you to the train station?”

She gives him a funny look, before she says, “You’re not going out for celebratory drinks with the camera guys? I think I heard that they’re gonna pack up and then meet back at the office in half an hour?”

He shakes his head. He says, “Nah. I’m old as dirt. I want to get to bed at a reasonable hour, and I don’t want to be more hungover than I already will be.”

Brienne frowns. “You’re not that old, Jaime. You always talk like you’re geriatric.”

 

 

  
He has spent a lot of time trying to figure out exactly what is the appeal of her, whether it’s her massive height, her excessive mannishness, or her honking laugh — he’s not sure when it all became charming and the qualities that he obsesses over in his memories. He finds that she makes him feel nostalgic, maybe. She makes him feel like how he used to when he was much, much younger — back when no one really knew him upon sight, back when he still had his hand, back when his future held promise and he believed that he could be capable of great things.

He tells himself that maybe he likes her because he is selfish and addicted to his own ego. Sometimes he tries to moderate his own feelings with these terrible thoughts, because that’s one way to cope.

“Are you panicking?” he asks her, referring to her joblessness.

“No,” she says. “Are you?”

“Not at all,” he says. “I’m actually looking forward to doing nothing at all. Or maybe I’ll pick up a hobby. I don’t know — what hobby can you do with one hand?”

“Oh crap, how about yo-yoing?” she says right away, giggling at the mental image probably.

“You came up with that _so fast!”_ he says, accusingly. “Have you been stockpiling dork-hobbies ideas for me to do?”

“No!” she exclaims. “My brain is just _that fast!”_

“Brienne,” he says, pausing for dramatic effect. “This is not typically a quality you have that I have observed, in the time that we’ve known each other. Lightning-quick quips.”

“What! I am _funny!”_

“I never said you weren’t. But it doesn’t come fast.”

“Dude —”

“Say something funny really fast, _right now!”_ he yells, around his smile.

“Oh my God it doesn’t work when you yell!” she shouts right back, her laugh crackling in the night air.

His own laughing is belly deep and almost aching. He fights to breathe as he laughs, as he tries to talk back at her in gestures.

 

 

 


	4. Dany

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dany finds that it's a little lonely at the top.

 

 

 

It’s still dark when she wakes up to her 4 a.m. alarm. It’s a sunlight alarm — that is, an alarm that emits artificial sunlight because her assistant told her that this is the most natural way to wake up. She listened to her assistant because she’s trying something new. She’s trying to not demoralize so much. She’s gotten feedback. Good God, she fucking hates this alarm clock.

She uses two fingers to shut it off — and then she drags her body of out of her bed, rubbing the grit from her eyes cautiously, trying not to rub her eyelash extensions out.

She hasn’t been drinking coffee lately because her nutritionist thinks she’s a tad dehydrated because her skin has been sallow and lifeless. She sometimes thinks that maybe she shouldn’t have gone into such a superficial industry. She probably should’ve stayed in school and become a doctor. Instead, there are ready-made jars of kale, oatmeal, yogurt, bananas, and coconut water lining the door on the interior of her fridge.

The blender whirs, nutrients get crushed, her stomach heaves with the emptiness of a black void — she could really go for some cheese — but instead, she chokes down half of her smoothie and thinks about the spreadable orange cheese and white crackers that she used to eat when she was little — what was it called? The cheese is horrible and fake, but it makes her nostalgic for childhood.

What was it called?

 

 

  
Her personal trainer kind of reminds her of Drogo, except way less mouthy and not as clever. Way more encouraging, though. Zane is huge and excessively muscular, like no one told him that sometimes being too fit is a little bit disgusting because it’s like, are these guys working out instead of reading books? She knows that’s she’s not one to talk. The last book she read was softcore female porn, and it was only because she wanted to be able to have something to talk about with her millennial assistant, during the long minutes — sometimes hours — that they are stuck in traffic together. That’s another way that she tries to meet people in the middle — reading porn.

She doesn’t know why she bothers because her assistant Doreah is inherently uninteresting due to lack of life experience. Doreah’s voice is also really grating and insipid.

She’s huffing and puffing after a three-mile run and twenty burpees. Zane likes to do this thing that he thinks is charming but is really fucking soul-crushing — he likes to pretend that he lost count and then he likes to say, “Oh, well, let’s just do it again!”

She stands on her wobbly legs and she says, “That was twenty. I counted.”

He says, “This is not a vacation, Dany. This is a journey. A journey of fun.” He likes to say shit that makes absolutely no sense. He is dumb like Drogo is dumb.

 

 

  
By 7 a.m., she’s out of the shower, eating a handful of almonds, and is on a conference call with her business partners and some investors. She’s on the phone so early because of the time difference. Makeup and hair people pluck and tweeze hair from her damp face.

This all started with a 50-page proposal from years ago, which she carved out time for in the midst of her busy filming schedule. It now seems painfully naive in hindsight. She learned. She refined. After the show ended, she came back with a 10-page pitch and five million in funds. It was proof of her belief in herself.

 

 

  
She needs new headshots, some promotional shots. It’s perhaps a bit of loneliness spurring her on, that caused her call him for a personal favor. They are paying him an exorbitant amount of money for the work — so that’s not the favor. The favor is that she has asked him to give a pep talk and a tutorial to her assistant Doreah so that he can give Doreah some pointers on how to stop taking such disgustingly asinine Instagram photos of her. Dany needs him to teach Doreah to stop filtering the shit out of pictures.

Beyond standard qualifications, she hired Doreah for her social media savvy and also her supposed photography skills. Doreah and her perky breasts had hundreds of thousands of followers that skyrocketed up to one million once she started working for Dany. It’s not that Doreah is unskilled, is that’s more that Dany is particular, and she just hates everything that this girl does. It is supremely hard to find someone not only competent, but _talented_ — that she also wants to spend twelve hours a day with. In this respect, no one on the planet will ever compare to Missandei.

 

 

  
“Hi, you,” she says warmly, reaching out to pull him in for a hug, careful to not smear her carefully made up face on his shirt. “It’s so good to see you! Look at you! So thick!” She literally means that he looks very handsome and very healthy. She remembers when he used to look sickly. That was alarming and unattractive. But he had a medical issue.

Grey laughs kind of sheepishly because he knows that she’s commenting on the way he looks. He’s letting her hug him, shrugging with his lens and camera body disconnected in his hands. He feels solid and not like he’s on the verge of dying.

“There’s so much makeup on your face,” he says distastefully, looking her over.

“Yeah?” she says, trying to look at her face in some reflective, shiny surface. “Is it hideous?”

“Dany, I think you look beautiful!” Doreah chimes in.

Dany shushes her. She says, “Shh!” as she does the hand clamping motion in front of Doreah’s mouth, nearly clipping Doreah with her nails.

“Is this a mineral foundation?” he asks the makeup artist, frowning.

Andy, the artist, looks aghast. She says, “No!”

Grey clicks on his flash and shines it right into Dany’s face, making her blink. He tilts her face up, one finger underneath her chin, oriented it at the light. “What the fuck is this glow, then?” he says, pointing at her cheekbones and the bridge of her nose.

“That’s a bronzer. I think it makes her look vibrant!”

“No,” he says. “It doesn’t.”

As she listens to him argue with Andy and her assistants, Dany has to force herself not to beam at him. Because this is why. This is why she hired him even though he repeatedly told her that he’s not really a portrait photographer, not really a fashion photographer. Obviously he can do it in a pinch, but she must know that there are better people for this, people who specialize in this.

She told him it’s a comfort thing, not necessarily about qualifications. She refrains from complimenting him because she doesn’t feel like it, and he doesn't need to hear it from her. God, he was fantastic to work with, too. She has missed him very much, too. After all, he spent years shoving a camera into her face as she masticated all sorts of interesting things in her maw. He made her look so attractive as she was all sweaty and sunburnt in the face. He has a really beautiful and special gift.

 

 

  
He picks from the catered spread on the table and she enviously watches him shove just about half of a beef sandwich into his face as she nibbles on her salad. The metabolism of some men. She is envious.

They catch up really quickly in the downtime. He tells her that he and Drogo have been really, really busy — but in town. They haven’t been traveling very much. They’ve actually been doing a lot of film work — believe it or not. She makes a mental note to tell him to hit her up more often then, if he’s in town. They can grab dinner and hang out socially.

She eagerly digs for gossip. She asks him if he and Drogo have been getting along lately. She likes to hear stories about how annoying Drogo is.

“Actually, yeah,” he says, laughing with his mouth full as if he’s surprised himself, in admitting this. “We actually get along about ninety-nine percent of the time.”

“Ugh, that’s so boring.”

“He’s a really good partner to me!” Grey says, grinning so hard. “Like, he’s really, really wonderful and considerate!”

“Oh my God, shut up,” she says. “I don’t want to hear this. I don’t want to hear how great he is.”

Grey kind of chuckles over that, too. And then he juts his chin out at her half-eaten salad. He says, “Yo, Dany, are you gonna finish that?”

 

 

  
Dany doesn’t think Grey is being forthright enough with Doreah. She doesn’t think he’s being efficient enough. She kind of falls into these old habits — she starts breathing down his neck and feeding him things to say. Dany tells him to tell Doreah that Doreah needs to open her fucking eyes and fucking stop taking pictures of Dany’s second fucking chin.

He gives her the side-eye. Doreah is red-faced and probably on the verge of crying. Dany thinks that this is the problem with millennials — all of the crying and all of the incessant talk about their feelings. They are frail.

In his characteristic deadpan, Grey says, “Oh, I get it now. You wanted me here so I can help you demoralize this person. Okay. I’ll switch gears.” He clears his throat. “Maybe next time, write it in an email. Maybe send me her resume beforehand. So I have time to prepare.”

Doreah looks very brittle. Dany has to hit her assistant to get her to knock it off. She shouts, “For God’s sake, he is _joking!”_

Dany immediately regrets physically touching her assistant. She takes her hands away. She does not want to get reported to HR again. Fucking millennials.

 

 

  
She finds that she misses the recent past so much. Seeing Grey made her yearn for the past. She misses the long shoots, the long days of travel. She misses being younger and being less concerned with her looks because she was not really a celebrity spokesperson and partner of a new lifestyle brand that the whole world is watching. They are all watching and waiting for her failure.

She misses being around people who generally _get her._ She misses people who have the balls to mock her and to try and degrade her to her face.

Holy shit.

She misses Jaime.

In the car, she shows Doreah a meme of a cat that gets hit in the face with a plate. It’s a funny meme. Millennials love memes. She shares this meme with Doreah in the hopes of smoothing over the entire morning. Doreah is sore about it.

“I’ve already seen that one,” Doreah says, handing Dany’s phone back to her.

“Wow,” Dany says. “You saw this, laughed at it, and didn’t even think about sharing it with me because you didn’t think I might want to laugh, too? Wow. Okay. I like cats. Sometimes.”

Dany is completely joking. And instead of laughing and giving her back some shit — Doreah’s pallor actually disintegrates some more — she retreats further inside of herself.

So annoying.

 

 

  
She probably had the first inkling that something was wrong with her brother when she was about seven years old. He locked her in her bedroom and waited until she was pounding on the door, begging him to let her out because she really needed to pee. He thought it was funny and did not let her out until she peed her pants.

His nature became really cemented in her mind and became really apparent with the death of their parents and older brother. Viserys told her that he did not understand why she was sad. He did not understand why people went on and on about it, after people died.

She feels a sick responsibility for him — not because she is misguided with her love — but because she really does not want to let him fuck up another person’s life. She would feel terrible if he ruined someone’s life and there was something she could have done to stop him. Over the years, she has given so much money to his treatment. Over the years, he has largely mocked her for her efforts. She keeps wishing he would just kill himself or accidentally die. He has told her that the trust was broken between them, the first time she had him committed against his will.

When he’s sober, he actually seems very normal.

“I’m seeing a woman,” Viserys tells her over lunch, breaking up his steak into smaller bites. He has lunch with her mostly to gloat. “She works in the grocery store as a clerk. Her name is Amy. She’s nice. Mousey.”

At one point in his life, Viserys was one of the heads of an investment firm. He ended up torching his previous life because of a raging cocaine addiction.

“Does Amy have children?” Dany asks.

“No.”

“Are you lying?”

He smiles at her.

Dany picks up her phone and turns it on. She says, “Text me her full name and her birth date, if you know it.”

He’s probably going to lie to her. But it does not even matter. Because she will find out, one way or another. She does not make mistakes.

 

 

  
She yells at Doreah simply because she is in a really shitty mood after lunch with her brother. It is not more complicated than that — and Dany remembers that Missandei used to just double-down on her own competence whenever Dany used to get insanely pissed because she told Missandei to make a judgement call and pick a vendor, any vendor — and then Missandei ended up picking the wrong vendor. She used to ream Missandei over that, and Missandei simply fixed it, quietly and efficiently and perfectly. Like a beautifully intelligent and capable human being.

Doreah just _cries._ All the fucking time. Dany cannot even do _anything_ with a crying girl in front of her face.

 

 

  
Doreah emails Dany her resignation letter at the very end of the day. It is a standard letter that states that Doreah has learned a lot from the experience — a whopping two months — but that she thinks that it is time to move on. She will stay on long enough to train her replacement. Dany does not know why Doreah would think that Dany would want Doreah to train someone with her two months of experience — two months of screw-ups, really. Fucking millennials.

 

 

  
Dany drives herself to the shelter. It’s her guilty pleasure that she has told very few people about. For years, with the constant coming and going, the traveling, it would have been deeply irresponsible to adopt. Even right now, with the atrocious hours that she works, it’s still deeply irresponsible. She thinks about it all the time though. She obsesses over it. She daydreams about cuddling in bed with one. But maybe she can get a small one that she can take everywhere. Maybe she can become one of those really irritating women with a tiny dog.

She just about cries, when she pokes her finger through the chain link door of the crate and a wet dog nose touches her fingertip. She donates money and she volunteers here once a month — mostly so she can get all of the doggy kisses and doggy snuggles.

It’s Carl, a Saint Bernard. He’s dopey-faced and very slobbery. He moves slow, and he’s seven years old. He does this cool thing where he balances treats on his nose and then when she says go, he tosses the treat in the air and catches it with his mouth.

 

 

  
She’s running on her treadmill at home — after eating another salad and a gluten-free slice of bread for dinner. She is trying to burn the calories of the bread, because that was a splurge. The relatable detail that she tells reporters in interviews is that she hates working out. She is normal — just like all of them — because she likes junk food, and she hates exercise.

After her workout, she collapses down on her couch wearing just her leggings and her sports bra. She does the mental math, and she knows that it’s morning where Missandei is at. She dials the number.

When Missandei picks up, Dany says, “Hey. I called because I’ve been thinking about you all day.” Dany refrains from outright admitting that she has been missing Missandei very much. “How’s it going?”

 

 

 

 


	5. Brienne

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Brienne needs a date to a wedding! Aw, them shipper feels.

 

 

 

She RSVPs herself and only herself for Renly’s wedding. Her logic is that weddings are expensive and Renly has complained about the cost per head to her. Brienne honestly thought she was doing her friend a real solid and saving him money by not bringing a plus one.

Marge emails her when the wedding is about a month out, letting Brienne know that there’s a spot open at Brienne’s table. There’s like, just nine people there. The table is paid for and everything. Margaery asks if Brie wants to give a friend a free meal.

Brienne asks her dad if he’s busy on the day of Renly’s wedding. And amazingly, he shuts her down real nice. His semi-retirement has been full of envy-inducing trips to their cabin. The cruises are not so envy-inducing because she hates cruise food. But anyway, her dad tells her thanks but no thanks. He does not even bother coming up with a reason for why he cannot be her date. It’s likely that he simply does not feel like it.

He chuckles over the phone and quickly changes the subject. Over the phone, he says, “Okay, so are you going to be home tomorrow?”

She says, “What for?” already suspicious.

“I overnighted you frozen elk. And I just don’t want it to rot on your doorstep.” Her dad goes hunting a lot.

“Dad,” she says. “Jeez, send me a tracking number next time so I can anticipate this better.”

“The computer prints the numbers so small. It’s overnighted anyway! You get it the next day!”

She knows he is right. She knows that he’s only doing things like how normal people do things. But she’s been verbally blasted by Dany, by Jaime, by Sandor, by random camera asshole so much over the years that she has a certain kind of PTSD now, when it comes to logistical details.

She says, “Okay. Good point. You got me.”

 

 

  
When Brienne asks Yara if Yara wants to be her date, there’s a scrutinizing look behind Yara’s eyes before her face relaxes into a grin. Yara leans back in her chair and raises her beer to Brienne. She says, “God, you need to stop hitting on me.”

Brienne’s face feels hot. She hates this joke. She hates this ongoing joke for a number of reasons. First, it always makes her stressed out because she _might_ be homophobic. Because her very first instinctive response when Yara jokes about her finally coming out the closet is a spastic _oh my God I’m not gay!_ response. It’s really terrible because she is fucking terrible.

Her other responses include feeling like Yara is way out of her league anyway, feeling like she’d also be bad at sex if she were a lesbian, feeling panic because how is she going to tell her dad! Her dad is very traditional.

“Ha, ha,” Brienne says sarcastically.

“Sorry, babe. I was already invited. I’ve already got a seat. Probably at your table?”

“Bummer.”

Yara is wiggling her shoulders in her seat, to silent music. She says, “I love weddings. I’m gonna dance so hard. Loras’ taste in music though. Ick.”

Brienne hates dancing. Mostly because she has no sense of rhythm and she tends to _tower_ over everyone else. People tend to watch her because she is so tall. And then as they watch her, they learn that she is rhythmically challenged and also extremely self-conscious when people are watching her.

“Body rolls are hard,” Yara says, trying to do the body rolls in her seat.

 

 

  
She’s probably putting an inordinate amount of pressure on herself, because Marge actually did not make it seem urgent at all. Marge really just made it sound like Marge is trying to toss someone free food and opportunity for dressing up.

Oh God, she has to dress up.

Somehow, this had slipped Brienne’s mind.

When she asks Jaime if he wants to be her date to Renly’s wedding, he says, “Yeah, sure,” kind of shrugging.

The casualness of his response is really suspect, so she grills him. She says, “Details, Jaime. Details.” It’s a prompt from back when they worked together. He is an idiot sometimes and tends to think that he can do everything based on zero preparation and one hundred percent charm. He used to fuck her over professionally really good back when she was green and innocent. She used to think that he didn’t lie to her unintentionally. But then she figured out that he lied to her unintentionally like — _all the time._

After some back and forth, she picks up this frustratingly convoluted thread. Jaime invited Grey at some point to be his plus one back when they got the invite, and Grey said, _sure, why not?_ Coincidentally — or not because they all used to fucking work together — Grey was also invited to the same wedding. So anyway, Jaime and Grey both RSVP’d yes and checked off plus one and wrote down each other’s names. And this went without comment for months, until Marge noticed and then sent them both a really bitchy email. Like, she emailed them and cc’ed Renly and Loras for no reason, just for shits and giggles. She was tearing them new ass holes because she had reserved two extra seats for them — one for Jaime’s plus-one and one for Grey’s plus-one. It was only when she went to do the seating chart that she realized that they are fucking stupid and are actually each other’s plus-ones. So really, there are actually two fucking empty seats to fill.

“Luckily, Drogo met a girl because duh he did. So that girl is taking up one of the empty seats at our table,” Jaime says. “So yeah, I’ll be your plus one. You, me, and Grey can be a threesome.”

Brienne drops her face to her hand. She mutters, “Oh my God, you’re such a stupid dumbass sometimes. Poor Marge.” After a pause, she shouts, _“You’re_ the reason there’s a hole at the table! _You’re_ the reason I’m scrambling to find a date!”

“Nah, dude, it’s Margie’s fault,” Jaime says. “She should’ve read the RSVP more carefully the first go-round. Obviously.”

 

 

  
She ends up going stag to Renly’s wedding because she cannot find a date. Because she is bad at dating. She thinks it probably scares men away when, on the first date, she asks them what their plans are for the next few weeks — do they wanna go to a wedding with her?

She wears nice pants because, why not? It doesn’t even matter anymore. This shit doesn’t bother her as much as it used to. She wears a nice white button up that Yara picked out for her, and she tries her best to iron creases into her slacks.

When she shows up at the ceremony, Yara says, “Oh my God, you look handsome.”

Brienne’s not sure how to feel about this at first.

But then Yara brushes her hand over Brienne’s hot cheek and she says, “Wow! Babe! Hello! Save a dance for me later, okay?”

 

 

  
When Brienne sees Dany and her perfect body walk into the venue in her sparkly silver dress that looks really fancy and expensive, Brienne thinks that that’s about right. Dany still manages to stun her by being really, really beautiful in a really conventional way.

When she sees Hodor walk in with his wife, Brienne just about loses her shit. Because she hasn’t seen him in nearly an entire year. She runs over and she throws her arms all over him. And then she gets all embarrassed when she realizes that she has never met Hodor’s wife ever before, only knows her from stories Hodor has told. She’s red in the face as she thrusts her hand out for the lady to shake.

When she sees Drogo walk in, all cleaned up with his date who looks like a model — Brienne gets this flashback to high school, and she immediately slouches a little bit and subconsciously tries to be inconspicuous. But then he spots her, and he bellows, “BRIENNE! HEYA!” which frightens some people in the immediate vicinity because he’s so loud, and she is like, oh! They are friends? At best, she thought they were just friendly former coworkers. She almost didn’t expect for him to remember her name.

When she sees that dumb assfuck from Ruddy Hall — she goes, “Oh no,” and then she goes, “How?” and then she goes, “Why?” and then she generally turns around and tries to hide in some curtains or something, before he can spot her.

When she runs into Jaime and Grey as they loiter around with drinks and appetizers, she cannot look directly at Jaime. Generally because of the way he makes her feel and the way he looks. It’s just like, excessive. It is too much. She almost wants to raise up a hand to block his fucking face from her line of sight.

Grey is pretty alright to look at, too. Though she’s not really super into intense, handsome, and dark because she is super intimidated by that particular synergy.

She doesn't know why she has to point out to herself that he is dark. She more meant it as like, that cliche. Like tall, dark, and handsome. Like in fairy tales. Like, referring to dark hair. Not skin color. He’s not taller than she is though. Not even close. Jesus Christ, her brain.

“Dude, killer outfit,” Jaime says.

“Yeah, I feel like a princess,” she says.

This makes Grey kind of choke on his drink — before he swallows and kind of chuckles. That makes her kind of squee inside. Because it’s really hard to make him laugh. It’s so great to make him laugh. It feels like an accomplishment. He probably thinks she’s kind of funny sometimes now.

“You guys both look nice,” she offers. “Honestly, almost everyone at this wedding is ridiculously photogenic. What the heck!”

“It’s a gay wedding,” Jaime says — and that is all he says.

“Dude,” she says, frowning. “That’s a little — come on, Jaime.”

“Come on what?” he throws back. “Did I not just say the truth? We are at a gay wedding.”

Brienne cannot really pick out the words to explain why this is slightly offensive. She just knows that Yara would have something to say about this. Probably. Maybe. Renly wouldn’t care. Why is she taking a stance on this again?

 

 

  
She keeps thinking that Jaime smells so clean, and he looks super amazing. More so than he usually does. So that is annoying because she’s hyper-aware of it today. It is making her self-conscious and extra awkward. He is either being a pal and pretending not to notice, or he just really doesn’t notice. He probably doesn’t notice because he’s probably used to the female gaze on him.

He’s being a really good date to Grey, really attentive. There’s a lot of a casual touching. They are honestly really weird sometimes.

Oh God, is she actually homophobic?

 

 

  
It’s really hard to get any time with Renly or Loras because everyone wants a piece of them, but she manages to snag a quick dance with Renly. And by snag, she means that she was skulking around the edge of the room, and he actively went and sought her out and dragged her onto the dance floor. He’s a great friend, actually.

“Do you think I’m homophobic? Even just a little bit?” she asks him.

That makes him throw his head back, laughing as he shakes his head. She cannot tell if he’s shaking his head like, no, he doesn’t think she’s homophobic, or if he’s shaking his head like, oh you!

“Are you having fun?” he asks, as he tightens his hand around hers, as they start to sway. He knows that this is the best she can do.

“Actually, _yeah,”_ she says. “I’m having a lot of fun.”

“No date?”

“Okay,” she says. “I don’t see you asking _the men_ this question!”

“Well, actually, I asked Sandor the same question earlier.”

“Oh, what did he say?”

“He said, ‘No. No fucking date.’”

“Oh,” she says softly. “I should try that response next time.”

Renly laughs at that too, spinning the both of them a little too fast. He says, “Brie, you’re the best. I love you.”

 

 

  
She evacuates her body from the dance floor once the music starts to pick up, once the ballads give way to heavy bass and the music gets all sexual. She’s kind of watching Drogo and Yara, without actually blatantly staring at them. Yara has apparently perfected the body rolls. Drogo is drunk. And he is a great dancer. How come some people are so blessed with rhythm and an effortless aura of cool? How come she got none of that?

“Hi.”

She looks over in surprise. And then she looks _up_ a little. In bewilderment, she looks at him through the dark and she says, “Hi,” back.

“Brienne, right?”

“Uh . . . yeah.”

“Hi,” he repeats, smiling at her.

“You remember my name?” She asks this because she recalls that he mostly used a lot of epithets, the last time they were around one another.

“I actually had to ask around a little bit,” he admits.

Oh. Creepy. That he asked around about her. Like a stalker.

“Um, Tormund,” he says.

“Huh?”

“Just in case you don’t remember my name,” he explains. “It’s been a few years. How are you?”

 

 

  
It takes Brienne a solid half an hour, before she accepts that she isn’t being punked and that this guy isn’t going to randomly punch her in the face and run away. She has issues. Mostly stemming from Ron Connington. Redheads are fucking awful people.

Wait, no. Sansa is really, really great. She likes Tyrion’s fiance very much.

Male redheads are probably generally fucking awful. Based on her sample size of two. It’s really scientific.

“What are you thinking about, right now?” Tormund asks her, tilting his head slightly.

She makes a face — an exaggerated face. She says, “I’m thinking about whether or not you’re gonna punch me in the face and run away.”

He winces. “Yeah, I was pretty awful to you last we met. Sorry. I was, um, going through some stuff — not that that’s an excuse. But I was, um, still in a bad place after my divorce.”

“Oh, you’re divorced?”

“Yeah, three years now.”

“Wow.”

 

 

  
When he asks her to dance, she tells him no — and she cannot even explain to him that it’s nothing against him. He actually seems really nice. It’s more her entire fear of dancing in public. She only danced with Renly because they’ve been friends forever, and there’s a comfort there. But she doesn’t dance with people generally.

He actually accepts it well. He suggests they play a game to pass the time instead.

Over food-stained tablecloth, he drops down two empty shot glasses. He got these glasses by ordering two drinks and then downing both of them right in front of her face.

He asks her if she knows how to play quarters. She tells him she generally gets it because it’s not rocket science, but she does not like to drink very much, so she’d rather not play a drinking game.

He says, “How about, instead of taking a drink, every time my coin lands in your cup, you have to tell me a secret about yourself. Something that no one knows.”

He lets her go first. He presses spare change into her sweaty palm, and he stares at her kindly, smiling. She is tempted to ask him why he even cares and why he’s even interested in knowing things about her, but she knows that she is being dumb — that is, she is being herself and she is being insecure and self-sabotaging. She tells herself that he probably doesn’t know many people at the wedding and that he is simply just passing time with someone he finds somewhat familiar.

 

 

  
Her head is braced against her hand, and she’s leaning heavily on her arm and slouching over the table as she tells Tormund about how she was once at the center of a sex bet. Which generally sounds more titillating that it actually was. What it actually was, was awful. She was very young, and it was very embarrassing and traumatic, actually. It kind of confirmed all of her worst fears about herself — and it happened early in life.

She says, “I think I have like, so many hang-ups when it comes to dating, _to this day_ , because of that incident. Like, I don’t date much.”

“I hear you,” he says. “I’m not good at dating, either. I think I still miss all of that stuff I used to have — that comfort and that predictability.”

“You like predictability?”

He laughs softly. He says, “Yes and no.”

 

 

  
They hang out together for more than three hours — they hang out all sober together as all of her former coworkers and friends gradually get more and more shitfaced all around them.

She actually doesn’t want the night to end — but the venue is closing down and she does not even have the balls to ask _a man_ if he’d like to continue the conversation they are having at like, a 24/7 diner or, God fucking forbid, _her place._

He does the heavy-lifting for her. He looks torn about it, when he tells her, “I don’t live here. We live in different cities.”

“Yeeeah,” she says slowly.

“Ah, shit,” he says. “Can I still get your number? So I can call you? Would that be okay?”

Her face. She knows. She knows that her face looks crazy and is displaying all of her feelings so transparently right now. It’s her terrible curse. But he seems not to mind. He just looks at her patiently as she makes up her mind.

She says, “Yeah. That would be nice.”

 

 

  
When Drogo tries to get into his car drunk and his date allows this — Grey runs over and wrestles the keys away from Drogo, who actually gives up the keys rather willingly. It might’ve just been a game of chicken. _Then,_ she sees that Grey is completely plastered also, and cannot walk a straight line. So she walks over to take all the keys away from him. She is usually their designated driver. Because she is not very good at drinking. She actually taxi’d to the wedding for this very reason.

She says, “Oh, God,” and looks away when Drogo spontaneously heaves and starts throwing up on the ground, in the parking lot.

Grey is breathing heavy with his hands on his knees, and he’s leaning against . . . a car. Probably his rental.

“Wow,” she says. “You guys had a lot of fun tonight.”

He starts to say something to her — but he gets interrupted when Drogo’s date runs back up to them, scarily unbalanced on her heels, and then she starts hysterically crying.

 

 

  
Brienne looks at her ex-boss, and she says, “So, which ones do you want to be responsible for?”

Dany’s arms are crossed over her chest. She looks like she’s freezing in her very fashionable, very light coat. She’s surveying the scene before them — looking at Grey who is trying not to throw up, Drogo who has thrown up, Drogo’s date who is crying, and Jaime who actually seems like he’s doing okay.

Dany says, “Yeah, sorry, but I think I prefer Grey.”

_“Shocker.”_

Jaime and Drogo actually muttered that at the same time, in unison. They both look at each other and messily try to high-five each other in the dark.

“Dude, is she okay?” Brienne asks, referring to Drogo’s date. Brienne never learned this person’s name.

“She’s fine,” Drogo says, sighing. “She just can’t handle her liquor.” He is clearly annoyed.

 

 

  
Before they part ways for the rest of the night, he touches her on the elbow to get her attention. She’s kind of dreading this — perhaps in a general sense. She just dreads how she feels and how complicated it all is sometimes. She also kind of dreads goodbyes — also in a general sense.

He looks tired and ragged. He starts to say, “Are you —” before he thinks better of it. Then, instead, he says, “Did you have a good night? Did you have more fun than you thought you would?”

She tries to give him a smile. She says, “I did.”

He nods. He reaches out with his left hand and he touches her elbow again. He says, “Good. I’m glad.”

 

 

 

 


	6. Drogo

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Drogo has money, fame, and fortune now. (Kinda.) What more can he want? Not a girlfriend, that is for sure.

 

 

 

  
He gets to the office greasy, unshowered, a little hungover, and after 10 a.m. He just stayed up late, and then he overslept. He doesn’t think it’s a big deal because he won’t leave the office until 1 a.m. anyway. He is the kind of person that thinks the hours he keeps don’t matter as long as shit gets done.

Grey predictably stares him down with this embittered bitchface and waits until Drogo acknowledges that Grey is really pissed with him. Grey gets to the office at seven in the morning every day, like clockwork. He actually opens up the office, unlocking it and turning on the heat and everything.

Drogo does not know why he would call attention to the fact that he’s kind of unprofessional in front of the staff. Like, they know. But that is Grey’s nature as a boss, Drogo has found. Grey likes to publicly shame. Drogo does not know if this is something Grey picked up from Dany or if this is just something intrinsic in him. Drogo _does_ know why Grey was Dany’s favorite and why Grey got promoted over Drogo real quick. They were probably sleeping together.

“That’s a fucking joke!” Drogo barks, shoving Grey, who clutches onto his cup of coffee protectively. When Drogo has to tell Grey that jokes are jokes — it’s actually for the benefit for everyone within earshot. The issue is that Grey doesn’t always laugh, so it just looks like Drogo is standing there saying just terrible shit to Grey and Grey is taking it like he’s been the victim of years of verbal abuse. This is actually true, but their staff does not need to know the dirty details.

“Man, you are cranky this morning,” Grey says, taking a sip from his coffee. “Oh, I guess I mean mid-morning. Or almost-afternoon. Man, you didn’t want to take an early lunch before you came in?”

Drogo’s mood lifts then. Because Grey has gotten over the late start. Drogo says, “Bud, you have lunch plans? I can go for a wrap.” He means a steak wrap with za’atar seasoning from the new food cart kitty corner from their office.

“Okay,” Grey says. “I don’t have my wallet. You’ll have to pay for me.”

“How did you leave your wallet at home?” This seems impossible to Drogo. Because Grey is the kind of asshole that inventories lens caps.

There is a protracted silence.

A grin slowly creeps over Drogo’s face. He says, “Oh shit!”

“I did not come from home this morning,” Grey reluctantly admits.

“Oh shit! Where did you come from, man! And why didn’t you have a wallet when you took a lady out on a date? Like, what? Did you make her pay? Gangsta!”

Grey groans. He eyes the office. He hates talking about his personal life in front of staff. The staff in the office is not even fucking paying attention to this conversation. Grey says, “It’s a long story.” This means that this isn’t a story that he wants to tell.

 

 

  
Drogo is not as self-motivated as Grey. He also likes to ease into work. He likes to read the news on his phone. He likes to schedule meetings in the afternoon. He does a poor job of reading the dozens of emails that come in overnight. He doesn’t bother doing more than skimming because he’ll just bug Clea later for a recap of the things that are actually important. He even likes to clean equipment in the morning, as something for his hands to do as his mind slowly, slowly fully wakes up.

He was diagnosed with ADHD when he was about twelve. He was a shitty student in school. As an adult, it still affects him in the sense that he cannot stand doing anything he doesn’t enjoy doing. As an adult, he cannot stand _not doing_ anything he loves. He is very binary.

This is one way he and Grey overlap. They both can dip into an obsessive work trance, and it will be the only thing in their entire world. And they can do this for hours, if not days. It is kind of unhealthy, but Drogo has the best fucking career in the entire fucking world. And he is doing it with his bestest friend in the entire world.

They are sitting in their one conference room. He violently kicks Grey’s chair as Grey is on the phone with his credit card company, cancelling his card. The plot thickens. Now Drogo thinks that Grey’s date just stole his wallet — stole his identity!

“Yo, man. Was she pretty? How pretty was she? Oh my God, was she white? How did you meet her? Did you wear a condom? You gotta take care of yourself.”

“Hey!” Grey hisses at Drogo, gesturing to his phone. He’s on hold. _“Shut up!”_

 

 

  
Whenever the subject of Missandei comes up in front of Grey — usually accidentally because Grey doesn’t really bring her up on purpose anymore — Drogo is generally like, _fuck that bitch,_ about it. And then days later, he’ll call Missandei or she will call him, and they’ll catch up over the phone or over video chat at terribly inconvenient hours for him.

Drogo supports the Missandei embargo. Because all he really wants is for his buddy to be happy. Pain is pain. And all they can do is just not succumb to it. There’s no other alternative but to move on and to move forward.

This asshole works like, _so much_ though. It leaves little room for anything or anyone else.

Drogo is aware of his own hypocrisy.

She doesn’t come up this morning, but Drogo thinks about her nonetheless, as he watches Grey efficiently check off all of his card companies in a series of calls. A steak wrap sits in front of him, largely untouched, which is crazy not only because these wraps are delicious, but because Grey has a tendency to inhale all food that is in front of his face.

 

 

  
They don’t have to travel as much these days for work — a downside of being the boss is all of the administrative and all the procedural bullshit he has to deal with now. They have crews on various productions, big and small. Drogo does not touch cameras as much these days either. Life is all about trade-offs. He had to give up the tactile feel of making things come alive in his hands in order to have more control — to have all of the control. He’s a gatekeeper, a standard-setter. He has to carve time out of his day to review footage and look at edited cuts. It’s still everything he loves, but packaged differently.

When he picks up a camera — typically for passion projects, typically for very, very low pay — projects that get subsidized by everything else — he gets hit with wanderlust and nostalgia. He gets hit with the passage of time. He is no longer very young. He is in his thirties. Most of his friends have settled down and shacked up. His friends and his mother keep predicting the same for him. They all used to say it was his job that was preventing him from having stability in his life — stability was a code word for girlfriend or wife.

When the excessive traveling levelled off, they used to tell him to brace himself, because when he least expects it, he will get smacked in the face with love.

What few people understand is that he has already been hit in the face with love. He is in love with finding new and interesting ways to visualize the truth with people. He is kind of in love with everyone he films — even if just for a little bit.

He doesn’t think that his family or his friends understand this. Like, he has told them this, but they still insist that he will be smacked in the face with _real_ love. And it kind of makes him bitter. He doesn’t think there is anything wrong with him. He doesn’t want to insult them all by telling them that he can be so much more what they want for him. He doesn’t want to tell them all that they are trying to put him into a box in order to make themselves feel better about their ordinary lives and their cowardly decisions.

He gets that it’s unhealthy to work 15-hour days, though.

 

 

  
He visits their graphic designer’s desk, and he blandly tells Meera that he likes fonts and the font-work on the interstitial looks neato. He asks her if she can make the font bigger and thicker, make it pop more.

He’s saying all of this to fuck with her. People like to assume that he is dumb because he is so good-looking and also because he is ethnic, probably. Maybe he’s inventing it all in his head — but he also honestly does not think he is fabricating this shit. Grey has told him that people talk to him like he’s stupid because he comes off a little too friendly and too relaxed. Drogo has told Grey that he doesn’t think he has to play that rat-race game and shove a stick up his ass in order to be taken seriously. He should be able to show up as he is, how he wants, as he looks — and he should be given respect, not only because he is a fucking human being with value, but also — fucking look at his resume. Fucking listen to the reputation he has. Fucking look at his body of work.

He does not understand how anyone can look at his work and deny him respect.

Meera is a new hire, and she doesn’t get him yet. She doesn’t get that he is just daring her to disrespect him.

And he really means that the typography looks okay close-up on a small screen, but in a large format, the font weight is too light and the text is white, so it will get lost and be hard to read. He wants her to bump up the text a notch and also increase the weight.

Like most people younger than he is who are also deeply talented in the visual arts, Meera is somewhat intimidated by his presence but also kind of misguidedly arrogant and overconfident. He does not mind this because he gets this. He used to _be this._

She starts schooling him. She says, “If I make the text any bigger, it will look . . . fat. It will look . . . like, overpowering and unbalanced.”

Visual art is sometimes hard to critique verbally. Working with the writers is totally different and at times, easier, even though that’s not his area of expertise. He just asks them to switch words with other words. He just tells them he hates when there are too many words to read. He just tells them when he knows that a script will run overtime.

With visual art, it’s sometimes hard for him to find words that are not something like, “Make it look less stupid, okay?”

When Grey walks by and peeps the screen, he stops in his tracks. He presses his hand into Drogo’s back as he leans over to examine the work. If Drogo is mildly intimidating because of the way he looks and the stuff on his filmography, Grey is wildly intimidating because of his filmography and also the fact that he doesn’t believe in positive reinforcement. Grey is wildly intimidating because he likes to workshop. He likes to showcase works-in-progress and go around letting everyone critique the shit out of it in front of the entire staff. Their relatively high turnover rate with the in-house staff is actually kind of Grey’s fault, though Drogo does concede that kids these days are a little too sensitive.

“Hey,” Grey says — and Drogo already knows that Grey is like, trying to hold back on the criticism. “You need to size this up one or two points, and it needs to be a heavier font weight. Old people are not gonna be able to see this shit in big formats.”

Drogo kind of giggles, turning around to try and tickle Grey — more shit Grey hates. Grey slaps his hands and tries to move away. God, this guy is the very best. He likes that Grey is his partner in work because Grey just naturally does all the shit that Drogo really hates without complaint. Grey picks up his slack. He likes to think that he also picks up some of Grey’s slack. Grey hates meetings. Drogo likes people quite a bit, so he doesn’t mind meetings. He finds value in them.

Drogo likes that Grey is his partner because sometimes they don’t even fucking have to say one word to each other. Sometimes they are already thinking the exact same thing.

“God, stop!” Grey snaps, hitting the heel of his hand right into Drogo’s shoulder, knocking him back a step. “Not at work, okay?”

And his choice of words — the phrasing — just cracks Drogo up. So much.

 

 

  
Drogo buys Grey dinner, too. He kind of has to or else Grey just starves. They take a dinner break at a bougie restaurant after the rest of the staff has gone home.

He buys Grey dinner on the condition that Grey just tell him what the fuck is going on. What happened to his wallet? Why didn’t he sleep at home last night?

“Yeah, so I met up with that friend Yara has been bugging me about,” Grey says. “She said she wanted to eat at steakhouse because there are good salads there. And I was like, ‘Oh, _okay?’_ but we went there. Turns out she wanted to go there to stalk her ex or showcase me to him. And she was successful because they made a scene. I didn’t want to get punched in the face so I left. But I left my fucking wallet in the excitement. I didn’t think much of it until I called the restaurant this morning, and they were like, ‘Huh? What wallet?’ So I was real pissed because Yara set me up with her psychotic friend who is like, a thief, too? I need to remember to call her to yell at her. Anyway, I stopped at Jaime’s for some money for the train home and also just to have some money. Jaime doesn’t carry cash and tried to give me his credit card. And I was like, ‘No man, I don’t think I should take your credit card.’ We ended up watching movies and I fell asleep there. Like, that was my night of debauchery.”

“Aw!” Drogo says adoringly. He finds this story really cute, actually, not pathetic like Grey seems to think it is. “At least you tried! You put yourself out there! Good job, buddy!”

“Ugh, what is even the point?” Grey says, shoving beets and goat cheese and walnuts into his mouth. “What is even the point in meeting someone and seeing if you like this other person? Where does it all even _lead?”_

“Well, sex.”

 

 

  
Drogo ends up driving Grey and his non-car-owning ass back to Grey’s apartment. They are making good money, but Grey refuses to take on debt. He refuses to buy himself a house. He likes to live in squalor. He says he likes to walk everywhere, and he likes public transportation. Sometimes Drogo likes to joke about it and say shit like, “Who _hurt you?”_ and then laugh in Grey’s dumbfounded face. It’s funny because there have been _so many_ people, who have hurt Grey. So that’s the joke.

On the way to Grey’s apartment, they actually see a window advertisement — with Dany’s fucking face on it hawking chairs or rugs or something.

“And the rich get richer,” Drogo murmurs, as streetlights filter over his face.

“Yeah, ‘cause you didn’t buy your mom a house last year,” Grey throws back.

“Oh my God, I’m such a great son! Thanks for the reminder.”

 

 

  
It’s not even midnight yet, but he knows Grey likes to go to sleep earlier. So this is why Drogo does not invite himself in. Instead he slaps his bud on the butt as Grey exits the car and he hollers at Grey to give him a call in the morning if he wants a ride to work.

Grey says, “You are _not_ waking up before 6 a.m.”

“Well no,” Drogo says. “You’d be on my schedule, the schedule of a normal person. I can get here by 8:30?”

“Yo, man. Deal. That would actually be awesome. Thank you.”

“Okay, I’ll be here,” Drogo says. “I love you, man.”

Grey frowns. Before he says, “I love you too, Drogo.”

It took Drogo maybe three years, maybe longer, to train Grey to say this back to him. The straw that broke the camel’s back was him telling Grey that life can be short. They never really know when it’s going to be the very last time they see one another. What if they wake up in the morning and the other one is just gone? This is why it’s important to tell one another where they stand and how they feel on a regular basis. Drogo really believes in this. Sometimes he almost believes that the love of his life does not have to be a woman. The love of his life can be a platonic love. Like, he's just really in love with this other human being for who he is at his core.

 

 

  
When Drogo wakes up the next day to his blaring alarm — he set it because Grey is a fucking monster — he blearily rolls over to turn it off and also to grab his phone from the nightstand.

He sees that there’s a text from Grey at around six in the morning. Drogo chuckles to himself in bed, as he reads the text over.

The text says that when Grey got up to get ready for work and had a poop, he was super alarmed when he saw that his poop was super red and so he spent time Googling “blood in poop?”

The second text message reveals that it was the beets. It was the beets they ate. Anyway, he just wanted to text Drogo this to give Drogo a heads up, so that when Drogo gets up and goes poop, Drogo is not scared by what he sees.

 

 

 

 


	7. Dany

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dany thinks that she might be in love with her best friend's ex.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Um, I think I just created the Grey Worm/Dany tag and I was SHOCKED that no one has wrote stuff for them yet!

 

 

She falls into a pattern of dinner once a week with him, sometimes once every two weeks if they are particularly busy. The predictability and regularity of it becomes something that she starts counting on. Sometimes it’s something that she actually looks forward to during grueling weeks and during moments of self-doubt.

Perhaps in the third month — after maybe ten dinners together — she finds herself taking extra care and taking extra liberties and taking long pauses as she stares at herself and her body in the mirror. She finds herself thinking about she can be _more,_ better and brighter and more beautiful.

This change in her is very disconcerting. She has also been noticing how she’s been avoiding Missandei, just a little bit. And it’s kind of hard to avoid someone who is thousands of miles away. There is naturally a lot of space in between correspondences.

But when they talk over the phone, when Missandei asks her what is new, Dany tells her friend that nothing is new. It is all same ol’, same ol’.

 

 

  
She’s having a hard time with the crab because of her nails, so he gently pulls the hot shellfish from her hand. He holds both ends of the leg in both of his hands — and it cracks and it splatters as he rips it apart.

He presses the shell in between his fingers, softening it a little more before he hands her back her food.

That makes her smile at him. She looks down at her bib, which she put on over her dress to make him laugh, and she says, “I like this restaurant. I like eating with my hands. I like all of the butter.”

“I had a _coupon,”_ he says in his own defense, looking off to the side in slight embarrassment. “One of our clients wanted to like, show us extra appreciation. And this is like, her favorite restaurant. And don’t even play. I knew you way back when you ate _all of your meals_ with your hands.”

 

 

  
She basically has no friends, so she doesn’t really have anyone to talk out her thoughts with. Her brother is a psychopath, so he doesn’t really understand human feelings that do not involve his own self-interest. She cannot talk to him about mimicry because his attention span is also short when he does not care about the topic at hand.

Her best friend is half a planet away and beyond the time difference, it’s a really _bad idea_ to have a chat with Missandei about the current object of Dany’s affection. Because Missandei used to bone the guy. Like, a lot.

Dany tries to remember the prepubescent advice she used to get from her middle school friends, back when Aggo was alive and she thought he was the reason the sun rose and set. Sometimes she tries to remember what that kind of love feels like — and she finds that time has blunted so many of her memories.

Sometimes she talks to Irri, her new assistant, to pass the time and to see what love is all about in this modern age. Irri dates a lot. Dany knows because that girl is constantly on her phone swiping left and right whenever there is a break.

What she really wants to ask Irri is — how does one know when something is more than just friendship? How does one differentiate those kinds of feelings from just long years of loneliness and of aloneness? And why is it that women only have a three-year period between being fresh-faced wunderkinds and wizened old crones?

Instead, Dany asks Irri how Irri knows when a guy likes her.

“Oh, he swipes right.”

“Oh, but what if he’s not on Tinder?”

Irri looks disturbed by that. She says, “Oh!” and recoils. “So he’s like, old?”

Millennials.

 

 

  
Irri abstractly tells Dany that Irri knows a guy likes her when he looks at her a certain way — she can see it in his smile. Irri tells Dany that she conveys to a guy that she likes him by being really cute around the guy.

“Clarify,” Dany says. “What is cute? How do you act cute?”

“Oh!” Irri looks bewildered again. “Cute is like, ‘Oh! I love this car!’ and then touching him casually on the arm or something. Sometimes I lean in, and kind of hug him, but I kind of don’t at the same time.

“Well, what if the guy doesn’t have a car?”

“Dany!” Irri says, kind of scandalized. “You’re _rich!_ Why are you hanging out with men who don’t even have cars!”

 

 

  
Dany runs into Drogo at a demining benefit at a museum. He’s all tuxed up, and his date is probably ten years too young for him. His date might be taking a gap year in between high school and college.

“Dude, fuck you,” he says, grinning evilly while he waits for his date to come out of the women’s restroom. “She’s twenty. She’s not planning on going to college. Because of her modeling career. It’s gonna take off, any day now.”

“Mommy issues,” she mutters, referring to him — she’s also saying it very clearly so he can hear her.

“Um, and philandering Daddy issues, thank you very much,” he quips.

 

 

  
Dany watches as Drogo is unrepentantly uncaring when his date tells him that she is bored and she wants to leave. He has been wrapped up in looking at the art, so he tells his date to beat it, then. Go on home, then.

The brutality of the exchange, which Dany was trying not to eavesdrop so obviously on, actually made her inwardly flinch.

The coldness in his voice is also actually the thing that inspires her to approach him again, after his date has left in an angry huff.

She says, “You like this?” She’s referring to the black and white photographs on the walls of people who lived through and survived living near minefields.

He says, “Yeah. They are so beautiful.”

 

 

Her feet are aching from her heels, and she’s trying not to make it sound so serious and so difficult, when she sits in a booth, in the waiting area of a late night noodle place with Drogo. Their arms are touching, encased in fabric, as she tells him that she’s been feeling these confusing feelings for Grey.

Drogo chuckles over the admission, which took way too long to come out of her mouth. He laughs, and he nudges her. He tells her that he’s actually not that surprised. Grey was always her favorite when they were all working together. And now — they are no longer all working together. She is no longer their boss.

Drogo tells her that she and Grey have like, so much in common actually — personality-wise. Like, Drogo gets this. He really gets it. He gets _them._

“What about Missandei?” she says softly.

“What _about_ her?” he says. “She left him. She gave him up.”

“Isn’t there like, a girl code?”

“Fuck that,” he says, also lowering his voice. “He deserves to be happy. _You_ deserve to be happy.”

 

 

  
Her heart has leapt into her throat, and it is pounding, when she texts him and she tells them that they should talk — that there’s something she wants to say to him.

 

 

  
She doesn’t really want to have this conversation in public, so she invites herself over to his place. It’s the first time she’s ever been to his place, and she understands why he tried to dissuade her from coming when she sees it.

It is _tiny._

“Why do you live here?” she asks him.

 

 

  
The problem with her and Daario was that they went into what they had with different expectations. For a long time, she was angry over it because she felt that she made her expectations rather clear from the beginning. She basically told him she was incapable of love. She told him that it wasn’t going to change. She stopped short of admitting to him that sometimes she just felt so fucking alone and so fucking empty inside that it is choking her. She was hoping that he would intuit that, that he would just understand.

But he didn’t. Most people do not understand her. And what she got out of it was a salve that lasted beyond its expiration date. She did not want to crush him. She did not want to hurt him. She was also terrified that everything she had worked so hard for was going to get burned to the ground because she was weak and had a lapse in judgement.

She is always worried about this. She worries about this right now, with him.

He gives her a tour of his place — to be funny and to make her laugh. It works. She looks at his kitchen area, and then from his kitchen area, he shows her his living room-slash-bedroom. He apologizes for the lack of sofa. He asks her if she just wants to go out to eat, honestly.

 

 

  
It’s probably a particular kind of cowardice that causes her to look at his really lovely face and touch it. She reaches out and cups his face in both of her hands. And then she flexes a little bit on her toes — she sees the stunned surprise and the fear in his eyes — she pushes past it — and she kisses him.

 

 

  
She kisses him, and she holds onto him tightly. She gasps when she feels him kiss her back — a ball drops down deep into her stomach when he kisses her back. She feels his thumb press into her jawbone, orienting her face to the side a little bit, and it makes the room throb and it makes her feel woozy.

 

 

  
She has pulled off his shirt and she has pulled off her own shirt and she presses him backwards onto his bed. His lips are swollen attractively, and his expression is inscrutable as he stares up at her, as he watches her face.

She wonders what is driving this and what is making her want this. She can no longer remember how it felt to love Aggo. She can’t remember if this is how this is supposed to go and how this is supposed to feel. She is always afraid that she is more like her brother than she lets on. She comes from the same people. They have the same genetics. She has her own issues with empathy sometimes.

She doesn’t know if she is doing this because she might be in love with him, or if she is doing this because she is trying to destroy the very last good things in her life, if she is trying to destroy her friendship with Missandei and if she is trying to destroy her friendship with him.

 

 

  
His hand clamps down on her wrist as she struggles with the button on his jeans.

He says, “Dany, stop. You’re crying.”

 

 

  
He throws a blanket over her, and he puts his shirt back on as he gets off the bed, as he goes over to his fridge. She doesn’t get what he’s doing until she sees him come back with a bottle of vodka and two glasses.

 

 

  
She shuts her eyes and lightly hits her head against the wall that his bed is pressed against. She finishes her glass, and she holds it out for him to refill. She whispers, “What we are we doing?”

He sighs. He says, “Fuck if I know.”

 

 

  
She tells him that she thought it would all feel different. He has to guess what she is referring to, and he asks her if she’s talking about the two of them, being together.

That actually wasn’t what she was referring to. She was referring to all of the hard work and all of the sacrifice that it took to gain control of every fucking thing in her life. She thought it would all feel very different but instead, it just feels like more of the fucking same. And she is just so fucking angry and hungry all the time. She is just so underfed all the time.

She asks him, “Do you think about me? Being with you?”

He doesn’t take much time to answer. He says, “Of course.”

“It works on paper,” she tells him. “We have all the makings of conventional success.”

“Yeah,” he says. “I know.”

 

 

  
Naturally, she asks him if Missandei is the reason he has to hold himself back — and here, she doesn’t only mean if Missandei is the reason he is holding himself back from a relationship with her. She actually means if Missandei is the reason he has been holding himself back from the rest of his fucking life. They must have this in common, too.

He says, “I’m no longer waiting. I don’t think about her much. I don’t remember her anymore.”

This makes her eyes sting, and it makes her insides hurt. She says, “I don’t think about him, either. I don’t remember him anymore, either.”

“Well,” he says lightly, spinning his glass in his hand. “You had the benefit of him dying. Missandei, unfortunately, did not die.”

This makes Dany laugh — she laughs in shock and surprise and also in gratitude. Because Drogo is right — Grey is so much like her, in all of these intricate and special ways.

 

 

  
She says, “Yeah, I don’t think we should.”

He says, “Yeah, no, probably not. It’s not worth losing you.”

She kind of smiles ruefully at that, that someone so great has to avoid having sex with her in order to not lose her. That she has to pay him the same respect so that she doesn’t ruin them.

“The sex would’ve been amazing though,” she says.

“Oh, no doubt,” he says. “I would’ve blown your mind. With all of the . . . stuff.”

She laughs again — because he is good at making her laugh. She reaches out, and she grabs his hand. She squeezes it tightly as she takes in a shuddering breath.

 

 

  
She goes back to the museum to see the exhibit again. Because she loved it, too.

“Oh my _God,”_ she says, spotting him. _“You_ again.”

“Dude, are you my fucking stalker now?” Drogo asks, before immediately laughing. “What the fuck! You playin’ hooky, too?”

“Yeah, bro,” she says, kind of mocking him. “Taking some me time.”

“Yo, man, self-care is no joke,” he says.

 

 

 

 


	8. Yara

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Yara sometimes makes it easy to be her friend.

 

 

  
When they all see the shot list, they know that it’s going to take forever and they are never going to be done. Yara is the first to mutter under her breath that her dad probably has an extensive shot list because he is nervous about shooting his first sex scene with two women. She mutters that it’s probably not easy for him to shoot this gay sex scene with his super duper gay daughter on set.

“But that’s a byproduct of all the rampant nepotism that I have benefited from,” Yara says to Grey and Sandor. “Dad’s just getting his comeuppance for all of the young careers he destroyed because he insisted that people give his daughter a job.”

Sandor completely ignores how hilarious she is — she sometimes manages to forget that she’s been filming with Sourpuss and Bitchface who hate jokes because they take their jobs _so seriously._ Rather than respond to her, Sandor asks, “So who’s gonna tell Balon that this shot list is unrealistic?”

“Oh, not it,” she says, counterintuitively raising her hand.

“I’ll go talk to him,” Grey says, voice low, eyes tracking over to where Yara’s dad is.

 

 

  
Grey comes back after probably ten minutes of discussion with her dad. He comes back with a shorn shot list and her jaw more or less drops. Grey treats it like it’s not really an accomplishment, like he does not even remember the one time her dad called him a sloppy and incompetent child right to his face in front of their crew and how they all collectively recoiled on his behalf.

She fondly says, “Baby bear —” and she finds that she’s about to say something gushy to him, maybe stuff about how glad she is still able to work with him sometimes because he is such a pro — but she catches and holds back the unfiltered emotion before it flows out from her face. It would feel vulnerable and embarrassing for her, if she said something genuine to him like that.

Instead, she casts her face into a superior smirk, and she says, “Must be nice to be a man and to just automatically get the respect of other men.”

He rolls his eyes at her.

 

 

  
She forces him to take her up on a ride home from the airport because it seems really stupid and impractical for him to drag all of his equipment onto the train in the dark and fight through a crowd of vagrants that might just slice his throat open if they knew how pricey some of his equipment is. And there’s also the fact that they are in midst of a snowstorm. Snow is rare. It has not snowed in King’s Landing in four years or so. Snow is dangerous, and it makes people crazy.

His hand is gripping the dash because her driving freaks him out a little — he is so fucking dramatic for a guy that is not great at displaying happy emotions on his face — and he looks disturbed and annoyed when she tells him she has to make a quick stopover.

Looking out the window at the snow, he says, “Man, I should’ve just taken the train home.”

“Babe,” she says. _“Relax.”_ Yara likes to tell Grey to relax because, she’s sure, whenever she says this to him, his ass sphincter squeezes so tight because it’s so little and so scared.

 

 

  
She has to stop over at Ygritte’s because she missed the both of the kids’ namedays because she was working, and she promised them that she’d bring them cool stuff back from her travels. She actually panicked on the day she was due home because she had procrastinated and perhaps also oversold how cool these presents were gonna be. She was due back home and ran out to the nearest market to buy a bunch of weird candies, graphic t-shirts, and a toy gun that they can share. The toy gun is a risky present, but the gun actually fires plush teddy bears. That might be okay?

After she pulls into the driveway, not yet fully covered in snow, she shoves some colored tissue paper at him that she purchased in a gift shop in a rush. She tells him to wrap the fucking gun for her. She’s trying to jam the t-shirts and fistfulls of candy into a bag that is actually for wine bottles. She would’ve bought two bags, but the gun is fatter than a wine bottle.

“There’s no tape,” he says. “Do you have like, any string?”

“Babe, just use your spit or something,” she says absently, trying not to swear when she hears a soft tear from her bag.

 

 

  
He tries to stay in the car, stating that he can just wait for her — but she ends up opening the passenger side door and just grabbing him by the arms and by the shirt and just hauling his ass out of the vehicle. He kind of fights her on it, and they tussle for a bit in Ygritte and Jon’s slippery driveway. Grey’s asking her why it’s fucking necessary for her to constantly put her hands on him, and she’s telling him to stop being such a baby and just be cool. She’s physical because she grew up in a household and family full of boys and manly men. Honestly, so many things about her are so obvious if he would just use his head for one second.

They are mussed up and breathing hard — her hair is askew — when Jon opens the door and looks over the both of them in surprise.

Yara raises her bag and the wad that Grey kind of wrapped in blue tissue. She says, “I just got back! Are the kids still awake?”

 

 

  
She says, “Oh damn, it’s a party,” when they walk in and she sees an entire classy and yummy spread on the table and a bunch of curious gazes oriented their way. Jon’s brother and little sister are here. Obara is also here.

Before Yara can say anything else, the two little rugrats slide out of their seats and they’re all like, “Auntie Ya-ya!”

She melts. She squeals, throws her arms out, and she says, “Hi, babies!”

And Bobby is all like, “Where are our presents!”

And Eddie is all like, “I can’t wait! I can’t wait! Oh my lord, I can’t _wait!”_

And Yara’s like, _“What?_ What are you guys talking about?” trying to pretend like she doesn’t know what they are talking about. She shoves all of the presents to Grey, who kind of panics awkwardly and nearly drops the gun.

 

 

  
“Wow,” Jon says, cocking the teddy bear gun. “So this is an inappropriate gift for the kids,” he tells Yara. He then aims the gun down the hallway and he pulls the trigger. The plastic clicks and a teeny little pink bear soars down the hall before landing on the slick hardwood floor, sliding down a distance. The kids kind of lose their minds and scream in delight, probably because they are sure that their dad is gonna let them play with the gun later. They’ve also been eating a lot of candy.

“Oh man, let me see that,” Arya says, trying to snatch the gun from Jon.

Yara is stuffing her face because she is so _hungry,_ having been too cheap to splurge on shitty airplane food during the flight. She keeps nudging Grey, who looks supremely uncomfortable in this house because he is really awkward around people he’s unfamiliar with. She keeps hitting him and signaling for him to jam some of this roast into his face because Ygritte is an amazing cook, and he loves to eat.

“Let me get you guys plates and silverware,” Ygritte says kindly, scurrying into the kitchen.

“See!” Yara declares, slapping him in the chest to prove her point. “She lives to entertain!”

 

 

They leave as fast as they do because he’s antsy. He keeps twisting around like he needs to pee, and she keeps telling him to just go pee already. And then he whispers to her that he should be getting home because he has an early day tomorrow.

They say their goodbyes in the foyer. She grabs the little rascals and she shakes them as she hugs them, which makes them laugh.

 

 

  
Back in the frigid car, they are both freezing, teeth chattering as they wait for it to warm up. She reaches out and she vigorously rubs her hands up and down his arm to get his circulation going. She asks, “Is that helping?”

He says, “Yeah, actually. Thank you.”

He tries to reciprocate — probably because he thinks it’s the right thing to do. He’s entirely unnatural and awkward about it — he doesn’t seem to know where he’s allowed to touch her. He generally sticks to her shoulder.

“You dum-dum,” she says affectionately, pulling him in for a brief hug over the center console of her car. She squeezes him and pats him on the back. “Don’t worry. I definitely do not feel that way about you.”

“That’s not why,” he says quietly as he pulls away.

“Huh,” she says, kind of thoughtfully now. “I wasn’t even meaning it like that.”

“It’s just — there’s just so much touching.”

She gives him a long stare, as the car continues rumbling to life underneath them.

 

 

  
As she _carefully_ and _cautiously_ drives him home, they probably have the realest conversation they’ve ever had with one another. He explains to her why he gets so weirded out by all of the touching — it’s generally because of all of the times he was attacked because of his body, in one way or another.

This turns out to be something that she can relate to — deeply. She can relate to feeling attacked or being attacked because of her body. And it’s strange to learn this about each other, because at this point, they have already known each other for many years.

She laughs softly, and she tells him that her dad never really hugs her. She sounds like a complete cliche, and she is completely self-conscious. Saying it out loud makes it sound so stupid and so minor. But she tells Grey that sometimes people swing one way in response to their parents — like they swing in the same direction. And sometimes people — like her — swing in the other direction, to try and outrun where they came from.

“But you can’t really fully outrun where you come from,” she says. And even this sounds overblown and too dramatic to her own ears. “Can you?”

“I haven’t been particularly good at it,” he says.

 

 

  
When she drops him off at his place — she does what she can’t help. She bestows a very clunky and very heavy-handed lesson onto him. She grabs him by the shoulders, and she yanks him over and she lays one on him. She gives him a quick smooch on his mouth and grins at him in the dark. He looks so uncomfortable and so not into it, but it only makes her smile widen because this is going to be their new thing now. She is prone to believing in overcorrection. She thinks that she can condition people to meet her in the middle if she forces them far, far outside of their comfort zones.

She’s been trained this way by her family and by her dad. She had to go through some bizarre lengths to kind of get her dad to kind of accept her. As an angry teenager, she used to casually drop the f-bomb all the time around him — and she means faggot, not fuck — just to get him to stop pretending and to get him to put a name to it — just to get him to see her. He eventually stopped his own usage of it, and it felt a bit like an empty, Pavlovian victory. But it was enough because it had to be enough.

“Baby bear,” she says fondly, thrumming the side of her thumb against his cheek.

“Why do you like calling me that? It makes me feel like a little kid.”

She tells him, “I like it because you’re hard and cold and so serious all the time — and it humanizes you. Plus, it’s our thing. It would be sad if I just stopped calling you this one day. You’ll see. You’ll feel sad when it is gone.”

 

 

  
A week later, Yara is grabbing a bite with Ygritte and Obara in the city — during their lunch breaks — and she’s mostly trying to pay enough attention to Obara’s relentlessly and progressively negative outlook on her own life and career — she’s trying to listen to a story about emails and how much Obara hates her company. It’s a story that holds way too many details, and Yara does not even give a shit. She’s actually marveling at how Ygritte manages to listen to this negative shit on a regular basis. At least Yara is incommunicado at times because of her travel schedule.

And Yara thinks it’s all fine — she’s being a good friend and everything is normal. But then there is a lull in the conversation, and in that silence, Obara scrunches her nose up like she has smelled a fart. And she says, “So _why_ exactly are you palling around with Missy’s ex?”

Yara says, “Huh?” in reflex. And then she blinks hard, clearing some fog from her brain. She says, “Wow, honestly, I forgot. Holy shit. I forgot they dated.”

“How did you forget that?” Obara says, looking rather unsatisfied.

“Because he and I work together? We’re colleagues?” Like, this is pretty obvious. And then, kind of reluctantly because she has never articulated it this way to herself before, Yara adds, “And Grey and I are friends.”

“I think it’s weird,” Obara says.

“Oh, noted. Thanks for your opinion.”

“Yara —”

“I totally don’t care!” Yara says, kind of loudly. “Am I not allowed to be friends with him just because Missandei broke up with him?”

“How would you feel if I became friends with one of your exes?” Obara says patiently.

“I wouldn’t even care. Go nuts. Do you want me to give you Ros’ number?”

 

 

  
Obara’s uptight puritanism is still stuck in Yara’s head as she grabs her sad sack of a brother and drags him to a bar, under the guise of helping him get him back in the saddle, helping him get back out there. She honestly just wants to slap the shit out of Theon sometimes and tell him to just fucking get over it.

She’s trying not to physically push him along as he hobbles into the bar, trying not to lean too heavily on his cane. She does, however, say, “Motherfucker, just walk normal,” and she means to not bother hiding the limp. It is pretty obvious, and it is no big deal.

She gets him all settled in with a beer in hand. He is relentless in his self-pity, so he says, “Yar, I’m not ready for this.” He probably means that he’s not ready to live a normal life with hope and shit. He is so fragile. Just like so many men she knows, he is so fucking weak.

This ticks her off because there’s no reason for their weak shit. What they have to contend with is pathetically small. She says, “You’re actually never going to be ready. You just have to bite the bullet and just do it. We’re just grabbing a beer. You’re just fucking having a beer with your sister. _Relax.”_

 

 

 

 

 

 


	9. Tyrion

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tyrion learns that sometimes arguments aren't really about what you think they are about.

 

 

 

Based on his zero years of experience in a marriage and based on his zero years of experience of being in a healthy relationship, Jaime tells Tyrion that women kind of go a little nutty — when it comes to nuptials.

Tyrion tells Jaime that he is so dumb. Sansa isn’t like that. Sansa is cool and not like one of those stereotypical women that Jaime has seen on TV. Tyrion tells himself that he knows his second marriage will be much different from the first. For one, his dad is dead so it will be very hard for Sansa to cheat on him with his dad — unless she wants to fuck a corpse.

For another, things have changed. He’s been through a lot of therapy. He’s older. He’s not doing shit out of a sense of vengeance anymore. He not doing things just to prove points. He held himself back from impulsivity for a long time now. His relationship with Sansa has been built around very, very meticulous planning. It’s been break-neck and fast-moving as fuck.

She has been very, very patient.

 

 

  
Funnily enough, after Tyrion tells Jaime that he is wrong about Sansa, Sansa starts behaving like a fucking insane-ass shrew. It is like Jaime and Sansa coordinated this to terrorize him or something.

Sansa wants to set up Grey with Jeyne, and Tyrion thinks it’s a real dumb idea — women are crazy.

This is a topic of conversation in their household for about a month, with Sansa harping on him and asking him why? Why? Why not? Why?

And he generally hates explaining shit that should be very obvious to people, but for her, he makes the effort. He starts listing it all off on his fingers.

He says, “One, you used to date him and it’s a little weird that you are setting someone you used to date on a date with your friend — for instance, how are you even going to introduce the two of them? ‘Hi, Jeyne, this is Grey. We used to make out and do some over the clothes stuff with each other. I think you two will be _great_ together based on the experience I had with him.’ Two, I don’t actually think you know Grey all that well, despite dating him at one point in your life. Like, what is it about Jeyne’s knitting club that you think is so interesting that Grey would want to hear about it at length? Three, he is kind of way out of her league — looks-wise, professional accomplishments-wise, money-wise, and by just about every other measure that people value —”

“That is a terrible thing to say about my friend!”

“She’s real basic, hon. And four, do you want to risk your friendship with Jeyne? What if it all goes terribly?”

“But what if goes really well?” Sansa responds.

Tyrion’s eyes basically bug out when he figures out that that’s her comeback. Like, she has no other points to make on this. She has nothing to say in response to all of the other things he said. He is positive that Sansa wants to set Grey up with Jeyne only because he’s single and _she’s_ single — and bam, that’s all it takes, right?

“She’s not his type,” Tyrion says, trying to dismiss the entire thing.

“You don’t know his type.”

“Actually, yeah I do,” Tyrion corrects. “Because he’s my good friend, and I’m really observant. Like, I predicted the Missandei thing way before _they_ knew. That’s how amazing my powers of observation are.”

“Observe this!” Sansa says. And she flips him off.

That makes him smile in spite of himself. That’s more like it. He says, “Sans, you’re great. I love that you keep it classy.”

 

 

  
Sansa won’t let the idea go so Tyrion calls up his friend and puts him on speakerphone. He doesn’t tell Grey that he’s putting Grey on speakerphone, either.

“Hey, man,” Tyrion says, looking at Sansa from across the kitchen counter. “So Sansa has this friend that she wants to set you up with. Interested?”

“No,” Grey says. And then he says nothing else. The line throbs in silence, throbs in Grey’s condemnation. Tyrion knows that Grey is _pissed_ that he picked up his phone for this. It makes Tyrion slouch over, cracking up silently. In the long pause, Grey says, “Anything else you want me to chime in on?”

Tyrion smiles at Sansa as he fights to compose himself. He says, “Nah, man. We’re good. Thanks for considering it.”

“Okay, bye.”

 

 

  
Tyrion goes over to her folks’ house. Her parents do not love him. He might even qualify them as possibly even disliking him a little bit. He supposes that he is probably nothing what they wanted or expected for their daughter. He has very little in common with her dad and her brothers. He is not only nonathletic, he does not like sports. He does not even like being a spectator of sports. In years past, he tried to hang out with them and bond with them in front of the TV. And it kind of drove her dad and brothers insane — how he was constantly checking his phone instead of acting like his week could be made or ruined based on the outcome of an arbitrary match.

There is something very wholesome, righteous, and blue collar in their family’s sensibility — even though they are not really blue collar — and he finds that the things he says sound really elitist, and in an accidental way. He probably would hate him, too, if he were them.

And beyond that, there are all of the obvious things. She is fucking beautiful and tall. He is really not. She is like the personification of lightness. And he is dour and constantly weighed down by a lot of regrets. He thinks that her parents expected her to fall for someone tall and handsome, someone who smiles easily, someone who likes to throw balls around, someone who doesn’t refute misconceptions with, “Well, actually —” which, he now knows, is just like nails on chalkboard to people like them. These are just the ways he’s been influenced and formed by his own dad.

She feels the tension between him and her parents, too. He knows she does because they have talked about it at length. Today, she is just working so hard to keep it fun and light. She is trying to force them all into getting along. He is trying to catch her eyes so he can convey to her to chill the fuck out. She is making this worse and infinitely more awkward.

“Tyrion met Jordan Cavanaugh last week!” Sansa says, her voice just impossibly high. “At an event. Remember?”

He squints at her. “Who?”

She’s gesticulating wildly, trying to jog his memory that way. It’s really not working. She says, “Um, you remember. You said he was . . . you commented on his slacks, remember?”

Ah. He understands now. Cavanaugh is a former professional athlete in something-or-other and a hall of famer in something-or-other. He started a vanity charity in his name that does something-or-other. Tyrion came home and told Sansa about an old meathead with shiny pants, like he’s on his third marriage, like he has a really, really fast car. Honestly, Cavanaugh’s greatest crime was that he called Tyrion “little buddy” and then patted him on the head.

“You met Jordy?” Sansa’s dad asks, rubbing his hand over his beard. “We love him.”

Of course they do.

 

 

  
He keeps telling Sansa that he knows Grey like, infinitely better than she does, but she is stubborn, and she refuses to accept the truth. She keeps lying to herself and telling him that she understands Grey in a way that he doesn’t. This actually kind of offends him and ticks him off, for various reasons. It offends him because Grey is actually his friend, not hers. She and Grey are on friendly terms, but does she have inside jokes with the guy and did she nurture and care for Grey as he recovered from brain surgery?

Her insistence that she understands Grey also ticks Tyrion off a little bit because he still occasionally contends with these feelings of jealousy and of his own inadequacy.

Beyond that, it mostly ticks him off because she says batshit things and he’s just so scared that Sansa might be stupid — like, he might be with a woman who is slow and bad at understanding the human condition — _again._ He feels this dread and this fear, which manifest as frustration and anger, as she authoritatively tells him that Grey is a really sweet, very shy, very nice guy. For this reason, she thinks that he and Jeyne would be a good match.

He keeps saying, “You’re fucking so _wrong!”_ to her face.

He keeps asking her why this is so important to her. She is either dishonest or she is just more hopeful that he thought she was, because she tells him that she is just so happy with him — and she wants this happiness for the people around them, too. She wants this happiness for Jeyne and she wants this happiness for Grey.

She asks, “Don’t you want happiness for your friend? Why don’t you want him to be happy?”

“He is _happy!”_ Tyrion shouts. “He’s just fucking _killing_ it. His company just got written up in the Times. He is doing _more than_ fucking _okay.”_

“I don’t mean professional happiness,” Sansa corrects. “I mean personal happiness.”

Tyrion shakes his head. He says, “What are you talking about? Happiness is happiness. We do not need to compartmentalize happiness. That fucker is _happy._ I know this because when I talk to him — there is fucking _excitement_ on his face when he tells me about what he’s been working on. I hear the _laughter_ coming out of his mouth when he tells me how things are going at the office. Holy shit, now that I’m articulating this to you, I am so fucking convinced that Grey has never been happier in his entire fucking _life_ than he has been lately.”

“You’re still just talking about a finite aspect of life,” Sansa says, sounding resolute. “What does he do when he goes home?” There are also unshed tears in her eyes — and Tyrion does not even fucking understand _why._

“He sleeps.”

“So he sleeps, and he goes to work,” she says slowly. “That’s his happy life.”

Tyrion refrains from scoffing derisively. He refrains from getting really mean and telling her that she’s not getting any of this because she’s not as good and as talented at something in the way that Grey is. She is a fucking normal person who cannot even conceive of what it feels like to make something beautiful and truthful from fucking nothing, using the power of her fucking mind and her conviction. She does not even know what it fucking means, or else she would not be saying all of this fucking shit to him.

“Why do you say it like that?” Tyrion says. “This is also my life.”

“I _know,”_ she says. “You’re gone weeks at a time, for over half the year.”

This has been a regularity in the entire time they’ve known each other. So he says, “Yeah, and?”

“I’m pregnant,” she says.

 

 

  
When he told her that he wanted to make long term plans with her, he did not mean this. He did not mean a baby at all. But he knows that it was stupid of him to have privately dictated these terms to himself and expect her to accept them blindly.

She wants to keep the baby. She wants to raise the baby with him. She wants to be a family. She keeps carrying this optimism forward in spite of her experiences.

He can see that her mother and father are torn about the pregnancy. They are excited for more grandchildren. But they are probably a little bit let down that his presence in their lives and Sansa’s life is — for sure — permanent now.

When he tells Jaime that Sansa is pregnant, Jaime grabs onto him and congratulates him. He is a little perplexed at how Jaime can view this as an unequivocally happy thing.

She has this faith that it will work out, when he tells her that he is afraid. He reminds her that his dad was always absent because his dad would rather work than be around them. She tells him that she knows this and she remembers him telling her this from before.

He tells her that he loves his job so much — he really, really loves it so much. It feels terrible to think that he has to give some of it up so that he’s not a shitty father. She tells him that she’s not asking him to give it up. She tells him that they have time to figure it out. She tells him that she believes it’s not a matter of swapping one thing for another. It’s a matter of making space for _more._ She says more because she must know that it’s a word that appeals to him.

She says, “I know you can do this.”

He says, “I’m really sorry.” And he means that he’s sorry for how fucking terrible and angry he’s been lately. He’s sorry for all of the nasty things he’s thought about her and felt about her recently.

“I know you are,” she says.

 

 

 

 


	10. Jaime

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Boys night out results in some real talk.

 

 

 

  
“She’s not even pretty,” Jaime says, shoving the rest of his burger into his mouth. It’s cold. The cheese has congealed. It tastes dry going down. “Her body is like —” He makes an up and down motion, conveying lack of curves. “It’s like, you know —”

“Dude, can you not?” Tyrion cuts in, dipping a few fries into his ketchup. “She was our colleague.”

“I’m just saying — we’d be so mismatched out in public.”

“Yeah?” Tyrion says. “Because one of you is a flaming asshole and the other one is a nice person?”

“Dude, I’m not trying to be mean —”

“Yeah, man,” Tyrion says, cutting Jaime off again. “You’re just saying a lot of mean shit and pretending that it’s just you keeping it real.”

“Dude, if you’re sensitive because of Sansa —”

“I’m totally not sensitive because I’m in a relationship in which my significant other is a million times more attractive than I am,” Tyrion says, now apparently just so ticked that he’s no longer letting Jaime finish thoughts. “Because I am a fucking adult, and I understand that _some people_ are not shallow and she probably sees _value_ in _me_ beyond how I look. I get that there might even be _things about me_ that she is physically attracted to. For fuck’s sake, she is pregnant with my kid.”

“As far as you know,” Drogo adds, grinning, suddenly invested in the conversation.

“Yes,” Tyrion amends, ducking his head down a little and smiling. “As far as I know.”

 

 

  
Jaime keeps minimizing his own feelings for her, and he keeps trying to convince himself that it’s the truth and it’s the right thing to do. He has told his therapist many variations of why. He has told his therapist this speculative metaphor about how he is a beast on the inside but beautiful on the outside and she is like a beast on the outside but beautiful on the inside and how their genetic make-up makes it impossible for them to be together.

Another theory: He has also told his therapist that he is so broken inside, he’s so irrevocably damaged that he is incapable of being in a happy and healthy relationship. He is refraining from tainting her with his trauma so that she can stay pristine and pure. He is trying to be a good guy. He is trying be her friend.

A third idea: He is just scared. He’s never had a real relationship in his life, so he’s really remedial and behind everyone else. He is too old to be figuring this out. He lost so much time because he was in a vicious cycle of self-destruction and codependency and obsession. Sometimes he thinks that he loved Cersei the way he did because she looks exactly like he does — and she looks exactly like how he remembers their mother. And how fucked up is that? He cannot possibly bring Brienne into this fucking insanity.

 

 

  
“I’ve been with ugly girls,” Drogo offers. “Not just butterfaces. Some of them were kind of fat. The sex was good. It’s honestly all the same in the dark.”

Tyrion chuckles over that, chucking a fry at Drogo’s face. It hits him neatly in the cheekbone and then ricochets back down to the table. Drogo picks it up and eats it. Tyrion says, “Don’t you miss the good ol’ days when you were saying this shit in front of the women we worked with and then they got all mad at you for it and tried to verbally beat you down so your feelings were hurt?”

“Yeah!” Drogo declares. “And I kind of still don’t get it! What did I say that was so bad! I was just telling the truth. I have had sex with women who weren’t conventionally attractive and who did not prioritize time in the gym for whatever reason. And the sex with these women was good. We shook hands at the end of it and were like, ‘See ya later!’ Like, why was she always getting so pissed at me over this shit? Did I ever say that these women deserve to be choked to death because they were not hot?”

“She was always getting mad because you talked about women like they’re meat, like their value is whether you’d fuck or not,” Grey says.

“Man, I know women have value besides whether or not I’d fuck or not,” Drogo says, grinning sneakily. “Like, sometimes they clean my house and sometimes they cook me food.”

 

 

  
Jaime has crowdsourced a lot of opinions on this matter because he knows he is painfully dumb when it comes to this sort of thing.

His therapy sessions have been dominated by Brienne for a long time — mostly him agonizing over whether or not he should fucking _do it._ His therapist has been trying to steer him back to the unresolved issues he has with his dad and his sister, assuring him that addressing one side of the coin will affect the other for the better. His therapist tells him the very first relationship anyone has in life is the relationship they have with their parents.

Jaime has talked about this at length with Tyrion, with Grey, with Cersei, even — and also with his doorman.

So many people have heard him fixate on this that he wouldn’t be shocked if it turns out Brienne already knows all of it, and she’s just refraining from talking about it in order to help him save face.

He has also talked about this once or twice in front of Drogo, who Jaime was sure would not have an opinion or a stance that isn’t outside of valuable and normal. But the first time, Drogo actually shamed him and that fucker actually stared him down witheringly and asked Jaime how he got to be his age without learning what it means and what it feels like to fucking love someone else besides himself.

 

 

  
“How did you know?” Jaime asks. _“When_ did you know? _How_ were you sure that you were in love?”

“That’s a weird question,” Tyrion says blandly. “You just kind of know.”

“But _how?”_

“If you’re questioning it this much, you probably do not love her.”

“Grey?”

Grey shrugs. “You kind of just know.”

“Based on what?”

“Jesus Christ, based on how you feel about the other person, based on how the other person makes you feel.”

“I like Brienne a lot,” Jaime says. “I like hanging out with her a lot. I want to hang around her all the time. And she makes me laugh a lot. And sometimes, in a certain light, I think she looks cute. Is that love?”

“No, that ain’t love,” Drogo says. “Look, man, you skipped over me, but I’m gonna tell you what love is. Love is actually ongoing effort. It’s not a feeling. It’s action. It’s active devotion and interest in another person’s well being. It’s the act of being present. I know that I love my mom and my sisters because I think about the things I can do to make their lives easier and better — all the time. I know I love them because I feel so proud when they tell me about their accomplishments. I know I love them because when they do shit or say shit that makes me so angry and so annoyed because I just do not agree with them — I know I would still lay down my life for any of them. That is love.”

 

 

  
When Drogo was talking about his devotion to his family — to his mother and sisters, Jaime was surprised that he could not really relate on that level whatsoever. He’s now questioning whether he loves his own brother and sister.

His family is simultaneously small and fractured. His mother died early. His dad died late. Nothing was really gained in the space in between. Cersei is a shitty topic on the best of his days, and it’s awkward to talk about Tyrion in Tyrion’s presence. They’ve worked together for a very long time and the sterility of their business relationship bleeds into their personal lives. He can’t remember the last time he hugged his brother or the last time they had fun together and didn’t talk about work. He thinks about how everything he feels for Tyrion revolves around how Tyrion makes him feel — is that love? He thinks about how fucking angry and depressed he was, dealing their dad’s death and Tyrion just wasn’t showing up for it. He thinks about all the times he made Tyrion mad at him because he was callous about something — and he thinks about how his feelings basically revolved around how awful he felt inside, because he did or said something shitty — and Tyrion just wasn’t putting up with it. Is that fucking love?

 

 

  
“Isn’t she sort of seeing that guy?” Drogo asks. “What’s his name — the wildling?”

“Tormund,” Grey fills in.

“Yeah, him.”

“Yeah, she’s been on a few dinners with him,” Jaime says, frowning. “It’s a long distance thing, so I don’t think it’s gonna get serious.”

“Oh, so it’s just purely about sex, then,” Drogo says. “It’s just a booty call thing, when he rolls through town. So you’ve got nothing to worry about, Jaime. She’s not gonna like, marry the guy.”

Jaime’s prosthetic hand slaps the table then. He says, “It’s _not_ a booty call thing.”

“Touchy,” Drogo says. “So let’s recap. What I am hearing is that you think she’s too ugly for you to realistically be with, but you don’t want her to have sex with anyone else ever, either. You basically just want her to be your best friend forever. You want her to spend her life just looking upon you adoringly as if you are her entire world.” Drogo reaches out and touches Grey’s chest. He says, “And you say _I’m_ the enemy of women?”

“I didn’t say that,” Grey corrects. “I said Missandei used to say that. But you know, she and Jaime were never that close when she was living here. So I’m not sure she ever got exposed to like — unadulterated, one-hundred-percent undiluted Jaime.”

 

 

  
He’s watching Drogo and Grey have this really easy and light side conversation with each other. He watches the casual touching and the laughing — and he remembers how he felt jealous and possessive when Drogo and Grey first became friends. He remembers how he felt threatened because he believes that affection is finite, that Drogo’s presence meant that Jaime would get less of Grey. Jaime also remembers feeling bitter because he felt he had earned it — he was entitled to a permanent place in Grey’s life because he helped the guy after his surgery. Jaime remembers being ticked when he didn’t feel like his good efforts were being properly rewarded.

He’s been trying to work on all of this, but it is really hard and really daunting. He still feels jealous all the time. He still feels left out all the time. He often resents it whenever Grey brings Drogo to an outing. He still hates that Grey seems to have a lot more fun with Drogo than Grey does with him. He keeps talking about his dad, his dead mom, his sister, and his brother in therapy, in the hopes of knocking this shit off.

He is probably never going to be normal.

 

 

  
“I’m saying, there’s a reason you’re perma-single,” Drogo says. “It’s because you’re like a Disney princess.”

Jaime looks around the table real quickly — at Grey and Tyrion — before he refocuses on Drogo. He says, “Dude, are you talking to me?”

Drogo hooks his thumb in Grey’s direction and says, “Well, I’m sure as fuck not talking to him.”

“Yeah,” Grey says, gesturing to himself. “Not a Disney princess.”

“Expand, Drogo,” Tyrion says, raising his glass to his face. “I think you’re onto something here.”

“You’re obsessed with all of the wrong things, Jaime,” Drogo says. “You are obsessed with drama. You are obsessed with optics and how it _looks_ and whether you guys will look good together at the ball. You want to be wooed and to be told you are the fairest in the land. You are probably the kind of guy that likes it when a woman cries hysterically and threatens to slit her wrists if you don’t love her back.”

“Dude,” Tyrion says, raising his hand up in front of Drogo for a high-five. “Fucking nailed it.”

Drogo cackles as he slams his hand into Tyrion’s, making Grey flinch from being jostled.

After settling back down, Drogo says, “You need to do some inner work, man. You need to look inside yourself and figure out why you get your rocks off to all of this toxic shit. You can’t be with Brienne or someone like Brienne until you get your shit figured out. She won’t put up with you. And be a fucking man. She’s allowed to have sex with other people, Jesus.”

“Dude,” Tyrion says. “Listen to him. He’s saying stuff that makes complete sense.”

“Man, I am smart!” Drogo says.

 

 

  
In therapy, he has talked about how he has very few friends, so he is really possessive of the friends that he does have. In therapy, he has made the correlation that she is his only female friend in the entire world — so perhaps for his reason, he is trying to convince himself that he is in love with her. His brain is just so fucking stupid and so bent that it does shit like that. It takes things that are good and great, and it makes shit terrible. For this reason, he cannot let himself ruin it. He cannot let himself lean into the way he sometimes feels about her. It is all a fucking trick.

 

 

  
“You’re just lonely,” Drogo says, really casually, as he slouches further in his seat with his beer. “You have nobody in your life so you’re just lonely. Just meet a nice woman and ask her out, fuck. It’s not that hard.”

Jaime casts his eyes to Grey — he actually bores his eyes into Grey’s skull because he wants to know why Grey is always fucking inviting Drogo to their things. Drogo ends up commandeering entire conversations with his oppressive opinions and thoughts, and Tyrion and Grey are generally never invested enough in a personal topic to fight Drogo on anything.

“You guys agree?” Jaime asks Tyrion and Grey.

“Honestly, yeah,” Tyrion starts, kind of reluctantly. “We’ve been listening to you talk about this for what feels like forever now. And I don’t want to hurt you, but I’m honestly kind of over it because you don’t do _anything_ and _nothing_ changes. You just like to talk and complain about it. You need to get a job because you have too much free time to just think about this shit. I’m tired of hearing you talk about this because nothing ever changes with you.”

Grey’s face pulls into a grimace — probably at how harsh it sounds spoken out loud. But he does not dispute Tyrion’s words whatsoever.

This actually makes Jaime feel like shit. It makes him feel embarrassed and self-conscious. He feels his face flushing and he refrains from saying something biting and petty because he knows that’s not productive. He says, “Oh. I was unaware I was doing that. I will stop.”

“Dude, we’re not trying to muzzle you,” Tyrion says, sighing. “You can talk to us. I want you to talk to me. But you’re depressed, Jaime. You need to get out there and fucking _do something_ again. Meet fucking new people and expand your world.”

 

 

 

 


	11. Pod

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pod just wants his former bosses to be proud of him.

 

 

 

  
Pod almost doesn’t say anything because his time is so finite and he knows that they are just massively busy and important and they probably don’t need to see him because he’ll be seeing them later in the year for Tyrion’s wedding, but then he’s talking to Erin over the phone about it, about how he’ll be passing through where his two former bosses live and how he misses them sometimes — misses the constant verbal assault and all of the demoralization — and Erin told him to just nut up and reach out. The worst that can happen is that they tell him to shove it up his ass, and he _did_ just say that he misses being verbal assaulted by them.

So it takes courage, but he reaches out. The day before he boards his flight, he cobbles out a quick email and he zips it off to Drogo and Grey. He tells them that he’s really sorry for the short notice, but he has a six-hour layover in King’s Landing and if either of them happen to be free, he would really, really like to meet up and perhaps have dinner or grab a drink with either of them. He will pay, of course. After all, he is the one inconveniencing them.

Drogo is first to respond. Drogo’s email was clearly written in haste because nothing is capitalized or punctuated. Drogo still manages to insult him and call him a dumb stupid little bitch for the short notice — and Drogo tells him to email back the flight number. They will pick his stupid bitch ass up.

 

 

  
He waits outside of the airport in the pick-up area nervously. He needs to pee because he was stuck with a window seat for hours and he didn’t want to bother his seat mates by going to the toilet. When he got off the plane, he was afraid of making Drogo wait, so he didn’t pee.

Ten minutes have gone by, and there is no Drogo in sight. Pod _knows_ that the second he leaves to go relieve his bladder, Drogo is going to show up and then get pissed that Pod isn’t waiting for him.

Sure enough, that very thing happens.

 

 

  
Drogo drives like a bit of a lunatic, and Pod is clutching onto his seatbelt as he tries to listen to Drogo talk a mile a minute.

“You really should’ve said something earlier, dumb shit,” Drogo says. “It was fucking hell trying to wrangle people together for your stupid ass because it’s so last minute. Grey had to fucking change his flight —”

Pod pales. He says, “Oh my God, he changed his flight for me?”

“— and Yara had to cancel on dinner with her family. Dany's gonna try and make it for a little bit, but she has an event that runs late tonight and she has to get up at the asscrack tomorrow. Jaime, Brienne, and Tyrion are not fucking in town, but they are bummed and they said to tell you hello. And yeah, Grey had to pay an assload and shuffle a bunch of shit in order to get on an earlier flight so he can beat you back here. Are you like, starving right now? I just ate.”

 

 

  
He sees that Grey and Yara are already on bar stools, backs to the door when he and Drogo arrive at the place. He sees Grey, and he feels terrible because he is a huge inconvenience.

The bar is crammed full of people and he lightly gets jostled by a large party that is trying to beat them to the hostess. Pod is in the middle of some muttered apologies when Drogo just gets fed up and breaks free from the traffic jam by the door.

Grey smiles at him, and Yara jumps off her seat so she can be the first to give him a hug, cracking his back and ruffling his hair. Grey follows suit, without the hair-ruffling.

The bar is too loud — he cannot hear much of what Yara is trying to say to him. He keeps shouting for her to please repeat — he does it until she gets fed up and and just shoves her drink into his hand. She gestures for him to just finish it for her.

 

 

  
He’s always been a lightweight. He’s never been like Grey, Drogo, Jaime, Yara, Dany, or any of the other high-functioning alcoholics. He is completely loaded after two drinks — his face is so hot and they are making fun of him so much as he’s trying to tell them that his new job doesn’t require him to drink on the job very much — or at all — so he’s really out of practice. The last time he had a drink was on his own nameday. And it was one single drink, too.

He has to scream to be heard. Because this bar is so terrible. He wants to tell them what’s been going on his life — not because he’s so arrogant and self-involved and think they would naturally be interested in his ordinary life — but because of the many ways they have affected him.

He asked out Erin on a date because of Drogo. Because Drogo basically told him to stop being such a fucking pussy and just do it. The worst that can happen is that she says no and insults his manhood in front of a roomful of people he respects. Drogo says that that shit is survivable. The best that can happen is that she says yes.

She said yes. She is wonderful. They are going five years strong now. They share a small one-bedroom apartment together. He has learned all of her quirks and uniqueness, and she has learned the same of him. He is probably going to eventually marry her.

He knows that they are going to make fun of him for being such a sap, but Pod’s spraying spit and screaming, “You know what I have been discovering, over and over again!” They give him three blank looks. He pushes forth anyway. He says, “I keep learning that everything I do, every quirk or good habit that I have! Is because of you! It’s because of you guys! I name files the way I do because of you! My current boss is great! But she edits so much!” He’s directing his comments to Grey now. “And I always remember how you told me that it’s brave and it’s the hard thing to do, to just stop working stuff too much! I’ve been overworking stuff, and I hate it! I keep thinking that it can be so much better! I keep thinking of you!”

Grey’s face reflects his utter confusion. He says, _“What?”_ He says, “I didn’t hear _any_ of that!”

 

 

  
They get a break from the torture when Drogo decides that it’s time to move locations. It’s nine o’clock, and Pod’s actually really hungry, but he’s too drunk and too shy to bring it up. Instead, they all pile into Drogo’s car as Drogo cusses out some loitering pedestrians, honking at them and gesturing at them to fucking move.

Pod jumps when Yara’s heavy hand comes down and slaps him on the leg. She laughs in the dark, throaty and loud.

 

 

  
“Don’t eat,” Drogo tells him, kind of threateningly as Drogo swipes up a glass of white wine from a table that is also full of mini appetizers and finger foods. The entire place is super fancy and there are water features and foggy blue lights illuminating like, mist.

Pod’s stomach actually rumbles in response to the no eating decree. He feels hopeless and a sense of yearning. His eyes just about bug out of his head when he spots Grey pick up a canape and shove it into his mouth.

Pod has sobered up a little bit — so it’s entirely terrible when Yara comes by and shoves a glass of white wine into his hand. He tries to protest. He says, “Oh, no thanks. I’m good.”

She says, “It’s free though.”

He has forgotten this about her — this funny thing about her. She grew up really wealthy but is still completely obsessed with getting good deals on things.

Spurred on by his memories of her, he accepts the glass of wine.

 

 

  
When Daenerys comes out to greet them and hang out with them for the half an hour she has free, he is kind of struck by how she looks. She looks like a really fancy lady. She looks entirely different from how he remembers her — kind of hanging out in the muck with all of them as they filmed the show. He remembers the Yin episode, when she took a bite out of the raw heart of a goat because because she was being punked by the villagers. He remembers her wild face, and how she was cracking all of them up with blood running down her chin and hands.

Right now, she looks like someone he’d never ever be even qualified to say hello to.

He actually makes an embarrassing sound accidentally. He makes a noise like, “Ick,” when she softly hugs him. She smells really fancy, too.

“Ick?” Drogo says, a smiling growing over his face. He chuckles. He nudges Dany as she lets him go. Drogo repeats, “Ick.”

 

 

  
Pod’s short reunion with Dany is a straight-up interrogation, and this _does_ feel very familiar to him.

She asks him how long his layover is. She asks him why he didn’t give more notice. She asks if he likes his new job. She asks if he likes it better than working for her. She asks how much money he is currently making. She asks if he finally has a girlfriend. She asks him how much traveling he has to do for work. She asks him what his girlfriend does for a living. She asks him if he would ever consider moving back to King’s Landing.

He answers all her questions quickly and briefly, without extraneous detail, which he remembers is what she likes.

Pod then watches in slight confusion and interest as Dany kind of buffs her nails on Grey’s shirt and tells him that he needs to get it together right now, because people have been kind of raving about his photos and he should spend a few minutes talking to his adoring fans — collect business cards and all of that.

“Oh, don’t worry,” Drogo says, trying to be funny. “I’ll just hang back here because my feelings aren’t hurt that you think he’s more talented than I am.”

“He _is_ more talented than you are,” Dany says, her face impassive.

Drogo smirks as Grey looks decidedly uncomfortable, standing in between them.

 

 

  
Pod hangs back with Drogo as Dany steals Grey away to introduce him to some people real quick. Pod watches as Grey — dressed in a t-shirt, jeans, and sneakers — offers Dany his arm to take. Yara has also taken a temporary leave because she spotted some people she knows. She’s currently also schmoozing.

“I saw Missandei last month,” Pod blurts, still following their retreating bodies with his eyes. “We had dinner one night.”

“Oh?” Drogo says. “How is she doing?”

Pod nods. “She’s good, I think. She says she might be visiting here soon — coming back to see her brother and nieces. She told me she’ll reach out to you guys when things are more concrete.”

“Sounds nice,” Drogo says blandly. “I haven’t seen her in forever.”

“She has a boyfriend,” Pod adds. “She brought him to dinner.”

That makes Drogo more alert, but only just barely. He says, “Yeah? That’s interesting. He nice?”

“Yeah,” Pod says. “He seemed like a pretty nice guy.”

Pod’s actually stopping himself from editorializing, from injecting his own opinion into this. He actually felt that she seemed a little off when they met up. She was really peppy when he casually mentioned his layover in King’s Landing and how he might reach out and see if he can see some of the old crew. She had beamed and told him to tell everyone she says hello. She said sure, with too much enthusiasm, when her boyfriend told her that he’d like to meet all of her friends when they visit King’s Landing.

“Man, why are we even having this conversation behind Grey’s back?” Drogo finally says. “What are you trying to say to me right now?”

“I don’t know,” Pod says. “When I saw Grey, that’s just what I thought about. I kind of feel guilty.”

“For having dinner with Missandei and her boyfriend? You are so dramatic.”

 

 

  
Pod understands why he was told not to eat because they wind up at a fish place — a special fish soup place that Drogo anticipated that Pod would really like because he’s been filming inland and hasn’t eaten seafood in probably months.

Pod is like, so touched by this that he almost destroys any esteem he has earned in Drogo’s eyes by almost crying in front of Drogo.

He says, “Oh my God, you have no idea. Erin doesn’t eat seafood so this is an extra special treat for me.”

“What?” Drogo says. “Your girl doesn’t eat fish? Kick that ho to the curb then, what you even thinking?”

“Well,” Pod says mildly. “She’s allergic to shellfish. She’ll die if she eats it.”

“Oh, great, I sound like an asshole now. Thanks a lot, Pod.”

 

 

  
At the fish place, Pod also learns about the time difference and the jetlag that Grey is contending with — a ten hour difference. Grey has been loading hot chili sauce onto his food, trying to keep himself awake with pain. Yara laughingly tells them that it’s so classic. It’s so quintessentially Grey.

“Oh my God,” Pod says. He just feels like shit. “Just go home and go to sleep. You don’t have to be here. You must be exhausted.”

“I am,” Grey admits. “But I haven’t seen you in forever, man. I’ve really missed you. I want to be here.”

 

 

  
Grey falls asleep in the backseat with Pod as Drogo drives him back to the airport. On the drive back to the airport, he feels sad actually. He knew that he has missed his friends, but he didn’t realize that he has missed them _this much._ All night, he has been listening to them crack jokes with one another, and it was a lot like how it used to be in the past — them being quick with the insults and him just watching the back-and-forths with wide eyes because he’s not like that. He’s not the kind of person that thinks it’s funny to say mean things. But he remembers that sense of belonging and the sense of being in on the joke.

Yara has to slap Grey awake when they get to the drop off area — because Pod refused to do it.

He holds onto them in a group hug. He says, “I’ll be back in a few months. I’m so excited for you guys to finally meet Erin.”

 

 

 

 


	12. Drogo

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Drogo has sex with Dany, breaks bro code.

 

 

 

  
He fucks up and sleeps with Dany because he is drunk and horny — and she texted him to ask him what he’s up to. He knows women well enough to know what she means when she says that.

He tells her that she has to come to him, because he is drunk and he cannot drive. He also tells her that she has to come to him as a way of taking a stand. He is not her on-call fuckboy. He is a person who deserves a modicum of respect from her.

They don’t even mess around with pleasantries when she shows up at his door. He has gotten the impression that she has had a bad day of some sort. He does not give many shits about this. He does not want to hear her tell him about her day, and he does not care if she is doing this because she feels angry and lonely. He just starts kissing her and starts dragging her into his bedroom. He just doesn’t have any illusions about what this is and what it means.

He’s actually thought about this a lot in the past though — having sex with her. He doesn’t think anyone would be surprised by this admission. She is beautiful and she has spent so much time just fucking telling him what to do and telling him all the ways he is wrong for being who he is. Of course he has thought about what it would feel like to fuck her.

He rolls a condom on, then he pulls her hair from her neck and he lightly bites down as he buries himself inside of her. He does not think about her pleasure that much because he is not proud of himself. He does not think about how he’s going to explain this to Grey.

 

 

  
Weirdly enough, when he wakes up the next day — naked, alone, sober, and kind of hungover — he immediately worries that he has made the unfortunate mistake of smashing with a woman that might end up being his best friend’s true love. It’s weird because after this thought pops into his brain, so does Missandei’s voice. Missandei’s voice is admonishing him — telling him things about what women are actually about. They are not possessions to be traded around and owned.

Still, it might be a little creepy and hard when Grey eventually comes to his senses and realizes that Dany is actually perfect for him. It will be creepy and awkward for Grey and Dany to eventually have sex together with the knowledge that Drogo has already pioneered and plowed this particular road.

Missandei was right. He is pretty gross sometimes.

 

 

  
Drogo can _feel_ himself being really weird at work — and Grey picks up on it right away. Drogo is overly polite and amenable. He keeps agreeing to everything. And Grey keeps looking at him as if he has sprouted a second head.

They are way too fucking busy to really sit down and hash out their feelings — but Drogo kind of tries. Drogo feels a sense of urgency about this — he tries to corner Grey in his office so they can have a quick chat. But Grey is ragged from an exhausting production schedule, so he puts his hand up and he says, “Whatever it is, backburner it for like, three days, man.”

“I don’t want to wait three days to talk to you, man,” Drogo says, kind of whining. “Can I give you a spoiler so you get the gist of what it’s about?”

“No, man. Don’t fuck with my shit,” Grey says. “I need to focus, and I don’t want whatever you have done to me to be a point of distraction, okay? Don’t be selfish. Just wait me for me to get through this.”

“Okay,” Drogo says glumly.

 

 

  
Dany — that wanton slut — actually hits him up _again_ at ten o’clock that night. She texts him and asks him if he can help her out with something. The difference this time around is that he hasn’t been drinking, and his conversation with Grey is really fresh. He cannot sleep with this bitch again before talking to Grey — he wouldn’t feel right about that. So he texts her back and he tells her that he is fucking busy.

He wonders what is it about about him — what is the thing about him that she cannot get enough of? Was it how he angrily fucked her really fast and then did not give her an orgasm? Was it how he didn’t offer her any refreshments, before or after? Was it how she had to specifically ask him where his bathroom is after sex, because he did not volunteer this information? What is it that makes this woman such a glutton for punishment?

 

 

  
Drogo asks Jhiqui if he can bounce some girl shit off her brain because she is a girl, they have only slept together a couple of times, and she also knows none of the players involved. Like, she’s never met Dany, and she only kind of knows Grey from the stories Drogo tells.

He has to buy her dinner for her advice. This is what she says. He chooses a fast-casual restaurant that is near the office, and he tells her to pick her burrito filling. Get extra meat if she wants it. She is worth it.

She smiles wryly when he tells her that oops, he slept with a woman that might be his best friend’s soulmate.

She says, “Man, the kind of trouble you get into because of that dick.”

He groans. He says, “I know.”

 

 

  
Jhiqui actually absolves him of a lot of his crimes, which, he suspects, might be one of the reasons he reached out to her. He just fucking needs someone to tell him that what he did isn’t that bad.

“They’re not dating — like, they’re not together,” Jhiqui says, taking a big bite out of her burrito. “I don’t believe in calling dibs, because that is completely disgusting and sexist. So you are fine,” she says through her stuffed mouth.

“That’s kinda what I thought,” he says, more than a bit doubtfully.

“Yeah, but let me ask you this — of all the women in the world that you could’ve had a one night stand with — why did you choose someone that your best friend kind of has a thing with?”

 

 

  
He thinks back to his high school days and how he used to be jealous of the Kuba twins. They were two track stars brothers that ended up going to the same college on full-ride scholarships. He was always kind of jealous of them because their parents were still together and they lived in a sick two-story house with a bunch of modern amenities. Their dad worked at a car lot as a salesman and their mom was always home because she didn’t have to work a job. All the twins had to worry about was fucking running their identical hearts out.

Drogo was a jealous turd because he didn’t live in a fancy house and his mom was constantly working a minimum wage job just so they could get by. He worked in a convenience mart for just about the entirety of his high school years because they needed the money. His dad was a stupid and angry asshole who just sat his ass at home like a hermit and just badmouthed Drogo’s mom all the time, calling her a bitch that took everything from him. His dad never gave his mom any alimony or child support.

And there were lots of moments during that time when Drogo looked at all of his sisters and he just fucking _wished_ one of them was a fucking boy. He just wished that he had one fucking brother that he could hang out with and play sports with.

This is probably why he feels particularly terrible over sleeping with Dany. What is fucking _wrong_ with him?

 

 

  
After three days, Grey’s fuse is very short and his mind is sloppy due to sleep deprivation. Drogo knows that the nice thing to do would be to let his bud go home and just crash for a day, replenish brain cells and energy. However, Drogo is selfish and he wants to unload and confess his sin right away. Grey has been very aware of how antsy Drogo is, so he puts up with delaying his rest for a little bit longer. They go to a late-night bar with a pool table. Drogo has temporarily lost the taste for alcohol, so he just sips from a glass of iced tea as he racks and gestures for Grey to break.

Grey does not waste time. The white ball smashes with a crack and sends the other balls rolling in different directions.

“So you’re solids, and I’m stripes,” Drogo says, patting the hole where the yellow ball went in.

"What do you need to apologize to me for?” Grey says testily, just looking like he’s barely standing up — looking like the pool cue pressed against the floor is the only thing keeping him on his feet. “What did you do to me that you can’t wait to tell me about? Is it about Missandei?”

This is the first time in a very, very long time that Grey brings her up in this sort of way — so purposefully and at the center of the conversation, not as a casual aside. Drogo is stunned.

 

 

  
Drogo quickly tells Grey that this has nothing to do with Missandei. He quickly tells Grey that he slept with Dany — that’s what happened. He tells Grey that while he knows that, technically, he is probably in the clear, morally, he is also a piece of shit because he kind of knows how Grey probably feels about Dany, and he definitely knows how Dany feels about Grey. Drogo slept with Dany possibly perhaps he had a little bit of trouble removing himself from the equation — he had trouble disengaging because of how _he_ feels about Dany.

“How do you feel about her?” Grey asks, frowning.

“Oh, she is a fucking awful person, and she often makes me feel bad about myself,” Drogo says, also frowning. “But I can’t get her out of my head sometimes.”

 

 

  
Grey has been completely unreadable ever since the news dropped. Grey has just been asking questions, and Drogo has been answering them. The questions are mostly of a logistical nature. Grey has basically been putting down a timeline to it all.

Drogo manages to barely win the first game, which manages to make him feel a little extra guilty. Not only has he robbed Grey of a pool victory, he has also made Grey’s inevitable connection with his probable-soulmate potentially awkward in the future.

“Would you stop saying that?” Grey mutters. “It’s so annoying.”

“What? That I slept with her or that she’s probably your soulmate?”

“The soulmate bit.”

They both know that Drogo is saying stuff like this because he just feels so bad, so he’s just trying to make himself feel worse to punish himself. They both know that Grey hates this kind of self-flagellation coming from other people. He thinks it’s not a good look.

As Grey re-racks, Drogo tells Grey that Dany is into him — like, she has a crush on Grey. Drogo says that this is kind of crazy to think deeply about because Drogo was previously sure she was a cold-hearted monster incapable of love, based on how she did Daario in and also based on everything Drogo knows about her. But the truth is that she has always had a real soft spot for Grey.

“I know,” Grey says simply, bending down to break again.  
  
“Do you love her?” Drogo finally asks. “If you love her, I swear I won’t fucking mess with it.”

Grey sighs. Then he says, “When I was with Missandei, and you and her were friends — I used to get so jealous because I was afraid she was going to leave me for you, when she realized that you are so much better for her than I am, when she realized that you are better than me in every way that matters.”

Drogo feels sick inside. He doesn’t know what this rehash of the past is supposed to mean. He suspects it doesn’t mean anything good. He says, “Okay?”

“Right now, I don’t feel that way,” Grey says, casting Drogo a look. “I’ve learned that we can’t keep people by holding onto them tightly. People will go where they want to go.”

 

 

  
They stop pretending that they are actually paying attention to their game. Drogo just quits and starts shoving balls into holes as Grey flags down a server for their check.

And then in Drogo’s car — in the dark — Grey kind of loses his grip on his composure a little bit. Drogo sees Grey’s hands trembling, cast in a pink glow because of a nearby neon sign, before Grey reaches up to rub his eyes with his fingers and he says, “I am so fucking exhausted. I don’t even know what is up and what is down right now.”

Drogo says, “Fuck, man. I am so sorry. Let me take you home.”

 

 

  
He goes up to Grey’s place because a bunch of Grey’s shit is in his trunk. He helps Grey carry up equipment because Grey’s building doesn’t really have an elevator.

In Grey’s studio, he quickly props the cases against the wall opposite the bed. Usually, Grey keeps some of his stuff under the bed, but Drogo also knows that Grey likes to spend time straightening his cameras and lens before he stores them.

Drogo turns around just in time to catch Grey falling face first into his bed. Grey uses his arms to push off a little, to roll himself onto his back as he blindly toes off his sneakers. They drop to the hardwood floor with dull thunk.

Drogo’s phone buzzes in his pants pocket, and he’s more reaching for it to silence the thing — but he catches a glimpse of the message. It’s another text from Dany, asking him if he’s busy because she wants to ask him something, and he immediately just feels red hot rage. He wants to scream at this bitch and tell her to go eat shit and just die because she and her vagina are just fucking ruining his life. He silences his phone and drops it on Grey’s side table.

Grey groans and the bed springs in his mattress creak as Drogo gingerly crawls in next to Grey.

“Dude, you are not sleeping over again,” Grey mutters with his eyes closed. “You’re too big, and this bed is too small for us.”

“Come on, man,” Drogo says, as a way of convincing Grey that this is a good idea.

 

 

  
“I know what you all think of me,” Grey whispers out into the dark room. Drogo actually thought Grey had fallen asleep. “You all feel sorry for me, and you think I am pathetic. I know you guys think I’m deluding myself whenever I tell you all that I am fine. I know you guys think that I am still in love with her and that I work so much in order to avoid my feelings. I know you guys avoid talking about her in front of me so that I don’t start breaking down in hysterics because she left after promising me she’d love me forever — kind of like my parents left me alone after promising me they’d be around forever.”

“Grey —”

“It’s been _five years._ She’s been _gone_ five years. My parents have been gone for _twenty-five_ years. None of you give my ability to get over shit enough fucking _credit._ I don’t know her anymore. I don’t want to know her. I don’t feel anything for her anymore because she is a stranger to me. All I have left are memories of her, just like all I have left are memories of my folks. And memories can be _painful._ But you must know what _remembering_ feels like because your dad died, too. We all just _deal_ with it. I’m not a fucking broken thing that isn’t a whole person just because someone doesn’t love me.”

 _“I_ love you,” Drogo says with conviction, getting choked up.

“I know you do.”

 

 

  
Drogo wakes up early enough to email their staff to tell them that he and Grey are coming in late and the rest of them can just fucking deal with it. Osha emails him back, in private, and asks him if his aggression and idle threats first thing in the morning are really necessary. She also asks him if everything is okay. He types away on his dying phone, and he tells her that everything is totally fine — Grey is just totally pooped. She responds quickly after that, telling him that Grey should really take like, an entire day off. He’s been looking really terrible the last week and needs rest.

When Grey wakes up at nine o’clock, he is shocked that he slept in — that he slept for more than ten hours straight.

Drogo hands Grey breakfast that he cooked — a rice bowl with steak and eggs. He also hands Grey a cup of coffee.

As Grey eats on his bed, as Drogo rummages around in Grey’s closet looking for baggy clothing that will actually fit him, Grey simply says, “You should respond to Dany — see what she wants.”

Drogo sighs, pulling out a sweatshirt. He says, “Yeah, I’ve been putting it off. I’ll call her later.” He unbuttons his wrinkled shirt and tosses it in Grey’s laundry basket before wrestling the navy sweatshirt over his head. It is kind of cozy — kind of tight — but not bad. Then Drogo says, “When Pod was here, he mentioned that he met up with Missandei and had dinner with her not too long ago. He said that she has a boyfriend.”

“Oh,” Grey says. “How nice for her.”

Drogo kind of chuckles at that, pulling a pair of sweatpants up to his body, trying to eyeball the length. “I didn’t ask many questions because it’s like — I don’t care. But I’d bet you so much money that — she has def screamed out your name a couple of times during vanilla sex with this basic bitch. How can anyone even forget you?”

Drogo starts laughing in delighted surprise, when Grey starts hacking on a bite of rice and meat. His bud starts choking on the bed, dropping the bowl and spoon in his lap as he starts slapping on his chest to get the rice kernels out of his lungs. Drogo starts hitting Grey in the back to help him.

And then he squeals when Grey’s foot shoots and kicks him right in the gut, making him double over — also in shock.

“Man, you think you’re funny? You think you’re _funny?”_ Grey says, laughing, trying to get Drogo again with his foot.

 

 

  
When he finally texts Dany back, she tells him to call her right away. He doesn’t really like being told what to do, and not really in this really bossy manner, but he figures he kind of owes her one because he’s been blowing her off for days.

He kind of expects her to want to talk about what went down — to tell him that it was a mistake and a lapse in judgement — stuff that he already knows.

But actually, she just starts chewing the shit out of him. She is yelling at him so much and calling him a fucking stupid asshole who is immature and self-involved. She is telling him that she has been going fucking insane looking for her wallet, and she has already cancelled all of her credit cards and has gotten a new temporary driver’s license. She is telling him that she thinks she left her shit at his place and all she wanted was for his stupid fucking dumb ass to take a quick look so she could avoid going through the trouble of cancelling all of her shit. But it is moot now. She has already worked herself up into a frenzy of rage because he’s a stupid little bitch.

“Oh shit, man,” he says to her over the phone, spotting her wallet on the floor of his bedroom, near the edge of the bed. “I totally have your wallet.”

 

 

 


	13. Dany

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dany makes healthy decisions, is embroiled in a love triangle! Sort of!

 

 

 

She thinks that she can actually make this work, with this particular guy. She pants out this groan and she shuts her eyes as she sinks back down on him. She feels his fingers drag across her sweaty body, over her hips and over the small of her back. He thrusts into her roughly and makes her bounce up. He catches his hand on her butt, sneaking a finger over the cleft and into crack.

She reaches around and sinks her long nails into his forearm. Her face better reflect her complete lack of amusement here. She wrenches his hand from that area of her ass, and he goes along with it. She slaps his wrist for good measure. She says, “I _don’t_ like that.”

He actually laughs at her — right into her face. He’s still inside of her. He snickers, and he plants his thick hands on her hips. And he slams her back down. She cries out because it hurts a little bit. She plants her hands on his chest as she gasps and catches her breath.

 

 

  
She was initially attracted to Daario because he was so confident and so boldly fearless in his inappropriate pursuit of her. He flirted with her shamelessly even though she was his boss. He looked at her with heat and smolder. His game involved these coy warnings — he was always warning her to not fall in love with him. She thought he was funny at first.

By the time she realized that things had taken a turn, it was too late and everything was already a bit of a disaster. She doesn’t know how she was so dumb and so blind, because she can recall these conversations with him. He used to make these oblique references about how he knew she was hurt a long, long time, so this is why she is afraid of love. She doesn’t know how she kept letting him get away with making such assumptions, but she did.

And before she knew it, he was showing her his softness and his vulnerabilities. He started confessing his fears and his worries to her. He started seeking out reassurance from her. He started texting her to tell her that he missed her and that he was thinking of her. She used to find his apparent clinginess to be increasingly off-putting.

She delayed ending it for far too long because she wanted to spare him his feelings and preserve some of his dignity. She was foolish, and it was all counterintuitive.

After she ended things, he would not stop bothering her. He kept begging for closure and for her to explain why. She kept telling him why. It was as sad and as simple as her not loving him back. For this reason, it wasn’t right to continue with the arrangement.

In one of his more vulnerable moments, he asked her why she didn’t love him back. She told him that part it was that he was too needy. She told him that she honestly did not think that he really loved her — more he was in love with the idea of her. Because all of the things that he thought about her were pretty wrong. She is not scared of love. She will not change because of love. She does not start to love because of sex. She chooses sex because she is busy and she is lonely and sometimes she just wants to be held by someone. She does not want to be on the hook for someone else’s happiness, which was what she felt like he was asking of her. That was why it had to end.

 

 

  
“Are you hungry?” Drogo asks, suppressing a yawn as he shrugs back into his wrinkled shirt. He’s sitting on the edge of her bed, and she smells like his spit. “Wanna eat? I’m gonna go grab a bite nearby.”

“You know my diet is strict,” she says in irritation. She basically can never eat anything fun outside of her own splurge meal a week — and she usually reserves that meal for Grey. Honestly, the mere mention of real food during weekdays makes her want to punch out a bitch, any bitch.

“Right,” Drogo says, putting on his socks. “I don’t know why I keep forgetting. And then asking.” Then, with his socks on his feet, he stands up. He is massive, and he just feels like he eclipses her sometimes. He quirks up a brow as he looks at her. He says, “You can actually stand to gain a few. You’re really skinny. Like, I don’t think it’s healthy.”

“Do you want some _money?”_ She says it a touch too loudly, and mostly to punish him. “For your services?”

He kind of laughs at that. He laughs a lot in general — he mostly laughs at himself and at his own jokes. He smiles at her and he says, “Sure. I can use some money. Shit. Thanks, Mom.”

That is kind of amusing. She is sort of sometimes charmed by how stupid he is. She actually was expecting him to be offended or to blow her off. She is unprepared. She didn’t know this was going to unfold like this. She cinches her robe tighter around her body, and she leaves the bedroom to go find her purse, with him slowly and casually following her from behind.

She digs through a mess of receipts. And then she extracts some cash — a modest amount. She hands him the bills.

He actually counts it, right in front of her. He looks like he approves and he’s pleased. He says, “Cool, I can buy like, two slices with this and a soda.”

Her stomach clenches in pain. That sounds really fucking amazing, actually.

He laughs again, when he catches the expression on her face. He shouts, “Are you sure you don’t want to eat! Christ, Dany!”

 

 

  
Over dinner, she tells him that she’s been sleeping with Drogo. For months now. Most accurately, three of them. Three months. She confesses this to Grey because she was unable to see him for one of the months she was sleeping with Drogo — because he was away in the Summer Isles taking photos. She had introduced him to Xaro and many others, who had seen the photos he took of her. She had to refrain from slapping Grey across the face every time she heard him tell someone that he’s not really a photographer and he’s also not really an artist. He gets hung up accuracy and terminology. He does not understand that people are trying to pay him compliments.

In spite of his self-sabotage, he and Xaro had a long conversation about what Grey would do, if there weren’t any commercial constraints on his work — if it was solely aesthetic and solely about the work. Grey said he’d go home. He’d go home, and he’d take pictures of home.

After not seeing him for a month — and then getting to see him again — she thinks that he looks really, really great — just amazing and healthy and beautiful. And that is why she just has to tell him that she’s been making terrible decisions lately.

Grey’s expression does not really change, as he stares back at her from across the table. After a pause, he tells her that he already knows about what she’s been doing with Drogo — because Drogo told him.

She asks him, “Does it bother you?”

He says, “It’s really none of my business.”

She can’t read him. She can’t tell if he’s annoyed or angry or if he really feels nothing over it. She also can’t read herself. She’s unsure of how she wants him to feel, whether she wants him to be annoyed and angry with her.

“It’s really casual and barely anything,” she says.

“Oh, okay. As long as both of you guys are okay with that.”

There is another lengthy silence.

“Dany,” he says, gently. “It’s okay. This is a little awkward, but it doesn’t bother me. You’re allowed to date.”

“Whoa,” she says, holding up a hand. “I’m not dating him. I would never be seen in public with him.”

“Yeah,” he says. “So this sounds real healthy. Can’t wait to see where it goes.”

That makes her laugh — the tension in her chest decompresses as she snickers at him — as she watches him fight not to laugh too, as he fights to maintain his straight face. She thinks to herself that he is so adorable sometimes, and he is really sweet. She still constantly wonders if she is in love with this person.

She could be in love with him, because of how hard she sometimes fights to not lose him. She’s never in a good place, emotionally or mentally. She doesn’t have much room in her life for someone like him — someone so deserving of much more than what she can give. Is she going to shack up with him and just wait for him to come home so that they can have dinner together? It’s impossible. It’s not who she is.

She’s been trying to figure out if it might be real love — apparently a really quiet and subtle kind of love — but maybe this is how adults love each other. She remembers that what she had with Aggo was dramatic and emotional. It even ended really dramatically and emotionally, kind of with her as a widow in black, mourning him for even longer than they’ve been together.

She knows that how she feels for Grey is very different. He was still working for her when he got his heart shattered, so they were all forced to claustrophobically watch him cope, day in, day out. He was unable to have much privacy as he dealt with the fallout. And instead of retreating into himself, which is what they all predicted and gossiped about behind his back, he actually became more open and communicative. He told them all when he was having really bad days, and he constantly asked for their help in compensating for his shortcomings.

It might be love because Grey might be the first man in her life who was emotionally raw and so openly vulnerable in front of her — and it did not disgust her.

“I can’t wait for all of this to blow up in my face,” she whispers to him, conspiratorially, smiling at him like they are sharing a secret.

“Yeah, but at least he’s not your employee this time around,” Grey says, also smiling darkly. “So lessons have been evidently been learned.”

“My God, lawsuits are scary.”

“Yeah, that’s generally how the saying goes. It’s hard to mend a broken lawsuit.”

She laughs again. She feels her face getting hot from keeping her laugh as quiet as possible because she is self-conscious about laughing in public.

 

 

  
She wants to buy one of his prints — or all of them — but she’s not really sure how well that would go over — if he’d think she was trying to control him with her money, if he’d be appreciative, if he wouldn’t think nothing of it, or if he’d think she was pitying him. She honestly does not know what goes through the heads of men sometimes. She actually wants to buy all of his prints because she doesn’t have much art in her place, and he does ridiculously wonderful work?

She is not surprised at the strong showing at the gallery. He’d express surprise if she brought it up, but she is not at all surprised by the devotion. She is not surprised to run into Jaime, Tyrion, Brienne, Sandor, Yara, Hodor, Bronn, Margaery, Gilly, Sam, or Drogo. She spends a little bit of time with all of them. She even spends time letting Jaime mock her for her most recent stilted TV appearance. He tells her that she must miss him. She admits to him that she actually does miss him sometimes.

She catches Drogo bopping his head along to the music overhead as he stares at a blurry print of a street corner and a game of chess.

“How do you feel when you see him do stuff like this?” she asks curiously. “Do you feel jealous?”

Drogo grins, not taking his eyes off the print. “Of course I feel fucking jealous. Of course I feel competitive and inadequate as fuck about it all. That’s natural human shit.” He shrugs, gesturing to the print. “But you can’t take away from this. You can’t deny what this is. He is so good. I can’t even get mad at him for being _so good_ because I am like — damn — his shit just guts me all the fucking time.”

“I sometimes think about how I robbed him of time,” she offers. “How I made him waste his talent on the show for years, and how I was probably too dumb and young to see that I was stealing from him.”

 

 

  
After they are done, Drogo asks her if it’s okay if he sleeps over — he offers to go sleep in one of her guest bedrooms if that is more comfortable for her. They both eye the clock — it’s one in the morning and he says he’s just too tired to get dressed and drive his fat ass back to his place, only to sleep for a few hours before getting up for an early shoot. If he stays over at her place, he probably will get an entire extra hour of sleep.

He looks like he completely hates asking her for the favor. He looks completely upset that he had to say something vulnerable in front of her. His eyes are avoiding hers as he tries to make a joke out of it, as he says, “I can like, sleep on the floor if you want. I can sleep anywhere.”

She honestly does not want him to mess up the bedding in her guest room because Sonya is not coming to clean for another four days. Dany does not want her guest bed to be mussed up and have his smell on it for four days. She refrains from admitting this to him, though. Instead, she says, “Yeah, you can sleep here with me. We’ve slept in worse conditions before. Remember Yi Ti?”

“Oh shit, yeah,” he says, shuddering. “Those mattress pads.”

“Just don’t touch me, okay?” she says, holding up her hands, as if to ward him off. “I don’t like cuddling, and I don’t like being hot. Just stay on that side of the bed and don’t move in your sleep. Do you snore? What am I saying? Of course you snore.”

“Christ, you are high maintenance.”

 

 

  
Dany’s cancelled on Missandei the last two, maybe three times, so she knows that she cannot keep putting it off. She’s been telling Missandei that the reason she keeps cancelling on their video chats is because the time difference is terrible and her schedule is really busy.

Missandei is very forgiving and understanding. And persistent. Missandei keeps sending updated cal invites so that they can make it work. Missandei’s engagement kind of feels odd to Dany, because Dany can remember a time when she had to harass and intimidate Missandei in order to get Missandei to hang out with her. God, Dany was so cool and so easy going. She is still so cool and so easy going.

She set her alarm to wake up at four in the morning. She wakes up to bird chirping sounds and artificial light. Drogo is somehow managing to sleep through this bullshit, and she has to crawl over his body in order to get to the clock. She had forgotten about this meeting when she agreed to let him sleep over.

It’s because she’s trying not to wake up him, that she answers the video call on her phone right away — Missandei is calling her early. She answers the call and then she realizes she’s still in bed and underdressed, so she quickly throws some blankets over Drogo’s face so that he won’t incriminate her and she quickly slides out of bed as Missandei’s face pops up on the screen.

 

 

  
She sees that Drogo is still lying in her bed, but he is awake when her call with Missandei ends.

“Have fun eavesdropping?” she asks.

“It was all of the talking that woke me up, actually,” he says. “And don’t think I didn’t notice that you tried to suffocate me so that you wouldn’t have to be seen with me. Let me ask you this — when are you planning on telling Missy that you are fucking _me_ in order to try and forget that you actually want to be fucking _her ex?”_

“Oh great, you’re chatty in the morning,” she says. “I forgot this about you.”

“Yeah, man,” he says, rubbing his face, chuckling a little. “I basically have a lot of thoughts just going — all the time.”

 

 

 

 

 


	14. Brienne

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Brienne becomes everyone's bitch, deals with a bunch of unwarranted bullshit. :(

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been kind of treating this story as a slow-burn monster movie, where you only get glimpses of the monster throughout. And then BAM! You see the monster at the end. (Missandei is the monster.)

 

 

 

  
Brienne is still sometimes a bit of a spineless wuss who has trouble speaking up for herself, so this is how she ends up being the scheduler. While she is not commonly known for being extremely astute and good at reading subtext, she actually figured out very fast that she is mired in some real dramatic shit that has been happening behind the scenes, and she should tread carefully. She learns that Missandei has been having a really hard time getting in contact with Daenerys. This is why Brienne gets tasked with planning dinner when Missandei is in town. Missandei convinced Brienne that it’ll be like the good ol’ days, and Brienne is their person on the ground.

So it’s not like Brienne and Dany are good pals. It’s actually totally not like that. She does not have Dany’s phone number. She has to go through Dany’s assistant if she wants to reach Dany — and this does not work because Dany’s assistant is like a fortress and does not buy it when Brienne says she’s an old friend that would like to talk something over with Dany. Dany’s assistant emails her back and says that Brienne is not on Dany’s personal contact list, and Dany has strict rules about who is allowed to actually talk to her. Dany’s assistant sounds like she’s been the victim of like, at least thirty verbal shutdowns from Dany. Brienne is pretty familiar with how that feels, so she cannot really begrudge the woman that much for merely doing her job well.

Brienne curses Missy as she works entirely way too hard to try and procure Dany’s cell phone number. She has to first go through Jaime, who is full of suspicious questions about why she needs to talk to Dany so badly. After she tells him why she needs Dany’s number, Jaime does not want to help her. Because he does not like Missandei.

“Maybe Missandei should think long and hard about why all of her friends are ambivalent about her,” Jaime offers — really unhelpfully. “And why are you her secretary?”

 

 

  
Yara does not have Dany’s contact info either. Grey obviously does, but Brienne does not think it’s a good idea to ask him for it, because then she’d have to explain to him why she needs it, and she is not so bold and brash. Plus, Jaime told her not to. Drogo might also have Dany’s contact info, but Brienne does not have Drogo’s contact info. Again, Grey is the keeper of this stuff.

In the end, Brienne has to go through Tyrion, who gives it up rather easily. He _does_ ask her why she needs Dany phone number so badly — is she looking for a new job?

 

 

  
She may not have all of their personal cell phone numbers, but she does have nearly all of their email addresses. After calling Dany to get her confirmation on a date and time — because Dany is probably the most important person to get at this dinner — Brienne sends out a mass email to a bunch of her former colleagues, sans Grey, requesting their presence at this dinner. She wasn’t initially sure whether or not to include Grey or not, because Missandei did not explicitly tell her not to invite him — but Jaime intercepts her and tells her not to be stupid. Definitely do not invite the guy.

After she hits send, a bunch of emails cc’ing everyone comes flooding into her inbox. Pod, Sandor, Hodor are not in town at the same time Missandei is. Yara says she already talked to Missy, and she will be there. Bronn writes back, “Who dis?” even though it is very clear who dis is because her name is right there in the from field. Daario is busy that night and requests that dinner gets shifted to another night and time in order to accommodate his schedule. Tyrion asks Daario if he is fucking kidding them with this shit. Jaime says he does not condone what that dirty bitch is all about, but he will still attend dinner if the rest of them are going because #FOMO. Drogo finally chimes in, and only to tell Jaime that he is a real racist piece of shit. Jaime tells them all that the dirty bit was not in reference to her skin tone, but more how she fucking dicked their friend over real good. Yara responds-all to tell them that they are all assholes and also to say that Missandei is not a dirty bitch for choosing her job over a long distance relationship. Hodor, who has already RSVP’d in the negative, gets back on the thread to say that, sometimes, people drift apart over time and distance. Sandor also comes back to ask them all to please take his email off this bullshit thread. They keep forgetting to do this consistently, so he starts getting every other email and then a bunch of side emails populate bitterly reminding each other that Sandor doesn’t fucking want to talk to them anymore.

 

 

  
Brienne learns that Drogo tattled on her because he straight up tells her that he tattled on her. He writes her a very short email that basically conveys that he told Grey that Missandei will be in town and that Brienne is planning her a fucking party.

She does not understand what all of the _aggression_ is about because last she checked, Drogo and Missy are pretty good friends. She decides it’s wise not to respond to his angry-sounding email.

A few hours later, she gets another email from him and she learns that she now flinches whenever she sees his name at the top of her inbox. She reads his email with one eye. He wrote that he thinks it’s real fucking uncool that Brienne left Grey out, that she purposely excluded him and is acting like this is fucking high school.

She wants to rail against this. She was massively unpopular in high school so she’s never actually had the opportunity to exclude anyone _on purpose_ before. She wants to rail against the lies and the injustice. She wants to scream at him through the computer and tell him that fucking Jaime told her to exclude Grey so that’s what she did. She is not up to date on their entire fucking dynamic so she thought that it was okay to listen to Jaime but _oh, what was she thinking?_ She must be stupid because she has forgotten that Jaime often unwittingly lies to her.

Brienne writes back to Drogo. She writes: _Oh, does Grey want to come to dinner, too?_

Drogo writes back: _I’ll ask him._

And then five seconds later, he writes: _No._

“Awesome,” she says out loud, to her computer screen. “Thanks a lot for that, Drogo.”

In addition to all of the frustration, she also gets heart pangs. This is just what it used to be like, back when all of them were working together.

 

 

  
Brienne ends up changing the reservation about one trillion billion times. Everyone hates her now — including herself. She hates herself. But the head count keeps flexing up and down based on a bunch of stuff — people wanting to bring significant others and then changing their minds about that, for instance. Tyrion says that Sansa is too pregnant to be seen in public and Brienne really takes that to heart and removes Sansa from the guest list — only to discover a day later that Tyrion was just joking around. Like, that is his idea of a joke — and it is making her slowly lose her mind.

Then, a day after that, Tyrion confirms that Sansa _really_ isn’t coming. Tyrion does not give her a reason why, but Jaime tells her that Sansa used to date Grey until Grey basically cheated on Sansa with Missandei. Sansa and Missandei have never met. Anywho, Sansa learned that Grey wasn’t going to this dinner and so she backed out — to hang out with him so that he isn’t hanging out by himself that night. Sansa is having a hell of time scheduling with Grey though, because they never hang out together alone and he is also really grossed out by her pity, so he is avoiding her.

“What was the point of all the detail in that story?” she asks Jaime. She does not think the first part is relevant to the second part.

Jaime shrugs. “Just to let you know why Tyrion might be getting in contact again to tell you that Sans is back in. It’ll be ‘cause Grey rejected her. Again.”

 

 

  
Over the phone, she tells Tormund what she’s been dealing with, on top of her actual job, and his warm chuckle kind of fills her entire head. He tells her that kneelers are so melodramatic.

She makes a face that he cannot see — she is not really in love with that term. She finds that these are the kinds of things that get lost over a phone line and text messages. They don’t see gestures. She can’t see that he might be smiling and joking around about this. He cannot see that she does not like softcore pejoratives.

“I might be in your neck of the woods next month?” he says.

“Yeah?” she says, brightening immensely.

“Yeah,” he confirms. “I’m about seventy percent sure, but let me get to one hundred, and then I’ll send my itinerary.”

 

 

  
Dany almost ruins everything when her assistant reaches out to Brienne to let Brienne know that Dany might not be able to make it at all — a last-minute meeting got scheduled.

Brienne still does not have close enough access to Dany to be able to convey to Dany that she is very disappointed and annoyed with this stuff. It’s a bit inconsiderate.

 

 

  
The closer the date comes, the more shaky everyone’s schedule becomes. People either forget and start planning things over dinner, or they just give her no reason for dropping off.

The list goes from over two dozen people down to just a dozen, and then maybe down to just seven. Brienne cancels the room reservation because she does not want to embarrass Missandei with such a paltry showing in a big room. She books a table instead. She loses her deposit on the room. Jaime tells her to fucking go hunting and demand that their asshole friends pay her back for the reservation. She tells him that it’s not really a big deal, and she’ll just eat the cost and chuck it up to a learning experience. She will never do this shit with them ever again.

 

 

  
She also does not think that Jaime should go to dinner with Missandei. This is becoming more and more clear to her, because every word out of his mouth about Missandei is just so embittered and deeply misogynistic. Brienne does not think Missandei signed up for a tense and violently awkward night, so this is why Brienne uninvites Jaime.

He actually takes it well. He says, “Whatever, I didn’t really want to go and look upon the stupid face of that bitch anyway.”

“You know she’s my friend, right?”

“Yeah, dude,” he says. “That is why I’m holding back.”

 

 

  
Missy tells Brienne that she is going to be staying with her brother and her nieces while she is in town, since she does not have a home in King’s Landing anymore. She asks Brienne if Brienne can pick her up from the airport.

Brienne is entirely being too accommodating — she obviously knows this — and if this was work, it’d be vastly different. But Brienne has been feeling kind of bad over what a shitshow this dinner has become. Missandei is unaware that a bunch of them tried to change their flights and rearrange their whole lives in order to see Pod months ago, based on some really bullshit short notice. Missandei is unaware Jaime almost choked out a woman at the ticket counter because he was on standby for an earlier flight — and he did not make it onto that flight. Missandei does not know that even with lots of time to get everyone together — it has been like pulling teeth to get people to agree to show up at her dinner.

 

 

The reservation gets altered fucking _again_ — and this time by Missandei herself, while Missandei is in the sky. Brienne gets a new email in her inbox from Missy stating that there’s one less for dinner. It’ll just be Missandei by herself for dinner.

Brienne is pretty over the drama, so she does not even ask what happened to Missandei’s boyfriend or whatever. She just says okay, and she calls the restaurant _again_ to amend the reservation. They tell her it’s okay, she can stop giving them the play-by-play. They are ready for her tonight.

 

 

  
When Brienne spots Missy standing outside of the pick up the area with one blue suitcase, Brienne waves spastically and then flashes her lights — which she immediately regrets because a woman with gray hair in glasses reaches up to block her face from the light. Brienne tries to gesture an apology to the woman, but the woman is not having it. She is pissed.

“Whoops,” Brienne mutters, sliding into an open spot.

 

 

  
Brienne does not expect Missy to start just freaking crying when they see each other. Missy’s shirt and body feels thin underneath her hands and all Brienne says, “Wow, it’s been so long,” before Missandei starts sobbing and just making a little bit of a scene outside of pick-up.

In bewilderment, Brienne quickly ushers Missy into her car before throwing Missy’s suitcase into her trunk. It lands with a thunk and a rattle and Brienne’s eyes go wide. She might’ve just broken something in there.

Back in the car, she bypasses Missandei’s tear-streaked face and she asks, “Hey, do you have like, a vase or something in your suitcase?”

 

 

 

 


	15. Margaery

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Margaery gets a break from mom and wife duties to go hang out with old friends! But one friend insists on really dragging down the mood. It's okay. Marge is determined to have fun no matter what!

 

 

 

 

She rushes over, apologizing for being late but traffic was terrible and her meeting ran over. She rambles on about the freak rain they’ve been having and how people drive like real fucking idiots in the rain. Her hand is fighting with the clasp of her purse, wrestling with it as rain water from her waterproof jacket kind of splashes Tyrion in the face a little bit. Marge is cussing out mother nature loudly as the restaurant’s wait staff pulls over a seat for her.

Margaery finally extracts her phone — that was what she’s been looking for. And she says, “Ah ha! Finally! Goddammit, this phone is supposed to be splash-proof, but I’m like, what does that even mean? I’m such a Luddite sometimes. Anyway, I don’t like risking it because I just live and die by my phone, you know? So I try not to get rain on it.” She takes a big breath and then lets it out in a sigh, looking around at the rest of the table. “So!” she says, reaching across Brienne to put her hand on Missandei’s wrist, just jostling it enthusiastically. “Oh my God! I haven’t seen you in forever. You look so pretty! You always were very pretty. Oh my God, tell me everything! You have to tell me everything you’ve been up to, but first — oh my God, I need a drink!”

 

 

  
Clearly, she has stumbled some sort of oddly tense situation between all of her former coworkers — she knows that. She’s generally a very perceptive person.

But she also doesn’t give a shit. Her work week has been horrendous. Lots of fires to put out. Lots of celebrities behaving badly and being caught on camera. Her husband has been sick and has been a real fucking baby about it. Her kid’s preschool is always wanting shit from her — mostly money — but when it’s not money, it’s stuff like homemade baked goods. She does not even have the time to lovingly craft chocolate brownies because she is busy working her ass off to pay the exorbitant tuition they request from her on a quarterly basis. She does not have time to find a drug dealer and buy the crack off of him so that she can put it into her homemade brownies because she is sick and tired of the school parents saying that such-and-such is like crack. ‘Sara’s mom’s chocolate chips are like crack.’ It is like, no. Crack is like fucking crack. She will fucking show them all one day, what crack is actually fucking like.

So. She is overcapacity on her ability to legitimately care about other people’s problems. She is fucking plumb out of empathy. She also wants to tell Brienne that Brienne’s emailing style leaves much to be desired. That fucking email thread planning out this dinner was a fucking disaster. Brienne should remember what is like to work with all of these assholes — that is why they should never all be cc’ed on something. Honestly, Marge almost missed the actual date and location because that fucking email thread was so fucking bloated.

When her first drink gets delivered — an amber old fashioned — she says, “Oh, hello, come to mama,” as she slides it closer to her face. She hasn’t had a drink in perhaps three weeks. She told her husband he was on his own tonight because she’s going out with her work friends. She needs to get out of mom and wife mode for a little bit, otherwise she will end up fucking murdering him and then killing herself, leaving their child a fucking orphan. She sucks down half of her drink real fast.

“Aw, shit,” Drogo says. “So it’s gonna be that kinda night.” He is grinning all sexy at her. He is so _fucking hot_. It is so fucking _ridiculous._

“Oh shit!” Margaery says, suddenly remembering. “Where is your partner in crime? Where’s your little buddy?” That guy is fricking beautiful, too.

“Um, I’m right here,” Tyrion says, raising his hand, an amused smile on his face.

“Ha-ha,” Margaery says, raising her glass to him. He’s cute and funny. She likes that about him. She clarifies, and she says, “I meant Grey, obviously. I haven’t seen him in a while. Oh my God, you guys saw that write-up on his show, right? The fuck? Man, where is he! I wanna talk to him about it!” Margaery is laughing now — the booze is already hitting her. “Is Grey busy right now? What’s he doing? Call him up and tell him to come meet us!”

 

 

  
So she remembers now — that Grey and Missandei used to date. That explains the protracted awkward silence.

Drama. She doesn’t care. She holds in a burp, orders another drink, and she asks Missandei if the breakup was like, contentious or something? Why does everything have to be so weird?

Missandei looks like a deer caught in the headlights. Yara and Tyrion thinks Marge is absolutely _hilarious_ because they are turning red from trying not to laugh out loud. Missandei is not answering her, which Marge thinks is annoying and also pointless, so she repeats the question. She says, “Was it a bad breakup?”

“Um, I’d rather not talk about it?” Missandei says.

“Girl, do you have like . . . a new accent?” she asks Missandei, leaning in, as if she can listen better this way. “Is it fake? Say something else. You sound a little funny.”

“It’s been a while since I’ve spoken Common Tongue,” Missandei says defensively, probably offended that Marge accused her of having a fake accent. But it sounds fake.

 

 

  
During Margaery’s third drink and over a plate of chicken and salad because she’s watching her figure, Missandei tells them about her life. A couple of years in Ulthos filming. A year back home in Naath. The last two in Volantis. Just a lot of moving around all the time. She tells them that the Ulthos documentary is going to be released in the next year, so there will be a big publicity push for it. She’ll actually probably be in King’s Landing a lot more often in the near future for this reason.

“That is so interesting,” Marge says vaguely, trying not to show that she is fucking bored out of her mind. She points her nose to Missandei’s left hand. “So I don’t see a wedding ring! Do you have a boyfriend! What’s his name? What does he do?”

“Oh,” Missandei says tensely. “No. I don’t have a boyfriend at the moment.”

“What!” Marge says loudly. “Are you sure? I thought I heard something about a boyfriend! You really don’t have a boyfriend?”

“No!” Missandei says, kind of snapping. “I think I _would know_ if I had a boyfriend! Why would I lie about this?”

“How is this possible! You are so pretty!”

“I don’t know what to tell you.” Missandei is so _pissed_ at her right now. It is _amazinggg._

“Oh, well since you’re single, you should totally get back with Grey,” Margaery says. Now she’s just saying shit just to get under Missandei’s skin. “He’s like, rich and successful now.”

“Oh my God,” Yara mutters, smearing the words into the palm of her hand. She's looking at Marge like Marge is a monster. And Margaery knows that Yara fucking _loves_ it.

 

 

  
Margaery knows that as much as a bunch of them around the table — Brienne and Missandei — are acting like they are completely horrified — Margaery knows that she is kind of the fucking savior of this really intensely awkward and weird dinner. She is making this dinner amazing and awesome with her presence. Without her, all of these people would sit in silence, just making torturous small talk with each other. But she is like, driving the conversation and keeping it clicking.

She is like, laughing so hard with Yara. She has forgotten how awesome and badass Yara is. They are mocking Yara’s dad — she’s worked with Yar’s dad on a few occasions before he fired her because he is an old man who thinks that films get promoted via carrier pigeons.

She has forgotten how clever and quick Tyrion is. He always picks up on all of her threads immediately, and he just expands on them like a fucking genius. He tells her he’s kind of nervous — or a lot nervous — about being a parent. She tells him that it’s never one singular action that will fuck a kid up. It seems like it will be the culmination of many actions.

She has forgotten how adorably self-aware Brienne is — and how hilarious it is. Brienne tells a story about how her coworkers keep trying to rope her onto their basketball team. She cannot convince them that she is not a baller. Not a shot caller. So she’s just going to show up and prove to them that she is all elbows on the court. Of basketball and of life.

Marge has forgotten about how fucking gorgeous Drogo is and how fun it is to look at him. She is not hearing a lot of stuff he is saying because he just distracts her so much with his beauty.

Missandei is not really bringing it tonight. But she is probably tired from the long flight. She is probably disoriented from all of their inside jokes with each other.

Margaery has forgotten how dark and stealth-funny Dany is. Dany is telling these stories of how young and how grossly incompetent her assistant is. Like, Dany recently asked her assistant to tape her for Instagram as she got her makeup done and that silly child came back with a roll of masking tape and asked Dany how she’d like to be taped. Dany yelled at the girl in front of the makeup people, telling her that if she is too fucking young to understand what videotaping actually is, still try to use her fucking head and figure out that it is not getting taped like a fucking human envelope.

“Oh my God!” Marge says, cracking up. “What did she say to that?”

Dany shakes her head. “God. She looked distraught, and she told me that she thought I wanted tape so that I could tape my boobs.” Dany gestures to the breasts in question. “She thought I didn’t like that people could see my nipples through my dress, so that’s why I wanted tape.”

“Oh my God!” Yara says. “That’s actually logical!”

“I know!” Dany bellows. “I was stunned speechless! I felt like such an asshole!”

 

 

  
As the night winds down — it’s nine o’clock, a perfectly appropriate closing time for people like her — the server brings them their check and places it in the center of the table. She boldly says, “So who’s taking care of the bill?”

“I will,” Dany says, reaching for her purse under the table. She then looks around. She says, “Oh, so no argument? So no one is gonna fight me on this? No one wants to split? Oh, okay.”

 

 

  
Drogo asks her if she is okay to drive home. She tells him that of course she is not okay to drive home. She’s gonna take a taxi home, and she’s going to have her assistants go retrieve her car in the morning. Obviously.

They loiter around a little bit. They linger a bit. They talk a little bit about their plans for the rest of the night. She is obviously going to go home and pound some water and just try not to catch her husband’s germs. She’ll probably bunk down with her child and wrap herself in that yummy milky goodness that comes from his head.

Dany tells them she’s probably going to go home and work out, because she ate too much food and her life is fucking sad. Marge does not feel sorry for this woman at all though.

Yara says she might holler at a girl that she’s been seeing. Marge oohs over that, asking Yara if the girl is pretty and what color her hair is.

Missandei is going to her brother’s house, to see her family.

Tyrion has to stop off at the store to buy more toilet paper. They are out.

Drogo tells them that he’s probably gonna turn in early. He has an early day of shooting, and Grey’s been on his fucking ass about showing up to things at least ten minutes early so they can do a last-minute verbal walk-through. Drogo shakes his head, laughing, and he says, “He’s such an anal retentive asshole.”

“Ah,” Missandei says lightly. “So that hasn’t changed. Will you tell him I said hi?”

“Okay,” Drogo says, shrugging tightly. “If you really want me to.”

“Will you tell him I said hi, too?” Margaery asks, because her timing is great and Missandei has been fucking awkward and unfun all night. “Will you tell him to fucking answer his emails once in a while? Tell him I want to see him. I can come down to the office, actually. I have a business reason for wanting to see him, by the way. This is not to stalk him, by the way. What kind of PR person do you guys have?”

“Man,” Drogo says. “He hates PR. So that’s probably why he hasn’t been responding to your emails.”

“I love how he hates success,” Dany says dryly. “I love that he tries to run away from it.”

“I love that he tries to run, but success still finds him,” Drogo adds. “Success is like, ‘Gotcha! You can’t get away that easily! We are meant to be.’”

“Oh shit, are we just saying things we love but really hate, but really secretly love about Grey?” Tyrion says. “This has been touched on, but I love that he is really good at correspondence. I love how I’m getting married, but I find time in my life to hunt him down to be like, ‘Hey, dipshit, can you RSVP yes to my wedding? I know you’re going. But you have to send back an RSVP.’ It’s like, the principle of the matter.”

“Oh, I got one!” Brienne announces, evidently proud that she can contribute to the joke. “I got one! I love how constipated he looks when I accidentally say something kind of racist to him.”

Drogo chuckles. “What did you say to him?”

“I told him he looks like he likes jazz!”

“Oh my God.”

“He does, though!” she says, gesticulating wildly. “I said that to him ‘cause I saw all of the biographies he reads in his bag the last time we travelled together! I didn’t mean it like, oh, Grey must like jazz because he is _dark as night.”_

“Oh my God,” Drogo says, just cracking up. “He’s not dark as night, though. And why does all the innocent shit coming out of your mouth sound _so racist?”_

“I don’t know!” Brienne says in exasperation, throwing up her hands. “He’s always real cool about it, though. He always tries to let me keep my dignity.”

“Dude,” Yara says, steering them back on topic. “I love the way he curls up and looks like he’s dying inside, whenever I cradle him adoringly in my arms and tell him that I love him.”

“Oh my God, that is my favorite, too,” Drogo says.

“Sorry,” Brienne says, nudging Missandei. “Are we talking about him too much?”

“Oh no,” Missy says, her eyes wide and innocent-looking. “You guys are clearly all good friends, and you’re very close with him.” She nods vigorously, her curls bouncing and reflecting the lights overhead. She blinks rapidly. Oh God, she is trying not to cry. “That’s so _great._ That makes me _really happy._ And it’s actually really nice to hear these stories about him. He sounds like he’s doing really good. That’s _so great.”_ And then Missandei just full-on starts crying.

“Oh, wow,” Marge says, lamely patting Missandei on the back. She is bad at consoling people. “There there, you.”

 

 

 

 


End file.
